Effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation on posterior alpha wave

Because of the unclear conclusion of the repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) effects on the posterior electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha wave, this study is aimed at investigating these unclear effects. Transcranial stimulation effects are observed by analyzing a measured EEG at the occipital area between prestimulation and the poststimulation. The EEG alpha power and alpha coherence are calculated and analyzed in terms of the ratio between eyes closed and eyes open periods. The results reveal that alpha power ratio at the individual alpha frequency (IAF) significantly increases after the 1‐Hz rTMS and cathodal tDCS and slightly decreases after the anodal tDCS compared to the control and the sham conditions. The results also show that there is a significant difference between the inhibited and excited conditions. Similarities are observed in the patterns of the alpha coherence ratio and alpha power changes. The alpha coherence increases in the rTMS and cathodal tDCS conditions, and decreases in the anodal tDCS condition but these effects occur only when comparing across the hemispheres (O1–O2 and P3–P4). It can be summarized that the EEG alpha wave can be influenced by the transcranial stimulations. The rTMS and cathodal tDCS seem to facilitate the alpha activity and the anodal tDCS inhibits it. © 2013 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The use of a virtual city model for assessing equity in access to views

The development of virtual city models has provided novel possibilities for analyses that require consideration of building heights in urban areas. The study was undertaken to explore these possibilities by using the virtual Kyoto model to examine equity in access to views in the Japanese city. A sample of just over 5000 residences was selected by stratifying for population age and affluence. A series of viewsheds were computed to quantify the visibility of a range of environmental amenities (greenspaces, water bodies, historical buildings, mountains) and disamenities (factories and roads). Evidence of inequity in visual amenity was identified, whereby homes in areas with many old people were much less likely to have views of greenspaces and water bodies, although they were also less likely to see factories and roads and were more likely to view mountains. Homes in more affluent areas had better views of greenspaces, historical buildings, and mountains, and were less likely to see factories and water bodies. We discuss the potential of virtual city models for furthering analyses of the urban environment and raise some caveats regarding their use.     

Static Coarse Grain Task Scheduling with Cache Optimization Using OpenMP

Effective use of cache memory is getting more important with increasing gap between the processor speed and memory access speed. Also, use of multigrain parallelism is getting more important to improve effective performance beyond the limitation of loop iteration level parallelism. Considering these factors, this paper proposes a coarse grain task static scheduling scheme considering cache optimization. The proposed scheme schedules coarse grain tasks to threads so that shared data among coarse grain tasks can be passed via cache after task and data decomposition considering cache size at compile time. It is implemented on OSCAR Fortran multigrain parallelizing compiler and evaluated on Sun Ultra80 four-processor SMP workstation using Swim and Tomcatv from the SPEC fp 95. As the results, the proposed scheme gives us 4.56 times speedup for Swim and 2.37 times on 4 processors for Tomcatv respectively against the Sun Forte HPC Ver. 6 update 1 loop parallelizing compiler.     

A scalable interest-oriented peer-to-peer pub/sub network

There has been a big challenge in structured peer-to-peer overlay network research area. Generally, a structured overlay network involves nodes evenly or based on their resource availabilities, and gathers nodes?? resources to achieve some bigger tasks. The challenge here is to gather resources based on nodes?? interests, and only interested nodes are involved in a certain task. Toward this challenge, we propose a new scheme to a peer-to-peer publish/subscribe network. Publish/subscribe represents a new paradigm for distributed content delivery. It provides an alternative to address-based communication due to its ability to decouple communication between the source and the destination. We propose a Bloom filter based mapping scheme to map IDs to nodes?? interests in addition to new interest proximity metric to forward events and to build nodes?? routing tables. We also propose a new approach called ??shared interest approach?? for network discovery. To evaluate the algorithms proposed in this work, we conducted simulations in both static and dynamic settings, and found a low false positive rate. We also discuss about a well-known application called Twitter, and show how our scheme would work in a real environment.     

Highly reliable a‐IGZO TFTs on a plastic substrate for flexible AMOLED displays

We have successfully reduced threshold voltage shifts of amorphous In–Ga–Zn–O thin‐film transistors (a‐IGZO TFTs) on transparent polyimide films against bias‐temperature stress below 100 mV, which is equivalent to those on glass substrates. This high reliability was achieved by dense IGZO thin films and annealing temperature below 300 °C. We have reduced bulk defects of IGZO thin films and interface defects between gate insulator and IGZO thin film by optimizing deposition conditions of IGZO thin films and annealing conditions. Furthermore, a 3.0‐in. flexible active‐matrix organic light‐emitting diode was demonstrated with the highly reliable a‐IGZO TFT backplane on polyimide film. The polyimide film coating process is compatible with mass‐production lines. We believe that flexible organic light‐emitting diode displays can be mass produced using a‐IGZO TFT backplane on polyimide films.     

A novel quarter‐wave retardation film for improving viewing angle properties in time‐sequential stereoscopic 3D‐LCDs

We have successfully developed a quarter‐wave retardation film (QWF) for wide viewing angle 3D liquid crystal displays (3D‐LCDs) that provides high luminance, low crosstalk, low color change, and low head‐tilt‐angle dependency. It was found that the out‐of‐plane retardation (Rth) of the QWF in the LCD needs to be close to 0 nm in order to improve the 3D display properties at an off‐axis position and that the in‐plane retardation (Re) needs to be adjusted from 120 to 130 nm to achieve low color change with head tilting. We adopted a coating process for making our QWF because of its potential for retardation control. 3D‐LCDs with this QWF whose Rth was nearly zero had high performance and allowed off‐axis other than on‐axis.     

Motion coordination algorithm for distributed agents in the cellular warehouse problem

A distributed approach is shown to coordinate the motions of transport tables for the cellular warehouse problem. In this approach, the tables are considered to be autonomous agents, and a built-in behavior function given by artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the evolved problem-oriented connection weights navigate the agents to their specified goals. To determine the agent to be moved, a measure of the priority to move is introduced. We show that distributed agents with the learned behavior function and the negotiation value perform a similar strategy to a “serializable” solution forN-puzzle problems, which provides a good heuristic strategy for large-scale problems. This work was presented, in part, at the Sixth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Tokyo, Japan, January 15–17, 2001     

A Face Identification System Based on the Mahalanobis–Taguchi System

In this paper, we propose a face identification system based on the Mahalanobis–Taguchi System (MTS). The MTS is one of the pattern recognition methods frequently used in quality engineering, and can perform robust pattern recognition by using training data, including noise. It is likely that this advantage will allow the effective implementation of a robust face identification system against lighting and face position fluctuations. Moreover, the MTS can optimize the number of attributes required for identification by using the orthogonal array and the signal/noise (SN) ratio. The face identification system has to deal with many users and the amount of data in a facial image is large. Therefore, the time required for identification can be decreased and the amount of data in the facial image database can be reduced by performing the optimization. We confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed system through practical experiments. The experimental results revealed that the MTS was an effective method for robust face identification, and could effectively reduce the number of attributes required for identification.     

Exponential ARX model-based long-range predictive control strategy for power plants

For nonlinear thermal power plants whose dynamics vary with load demand, a load-dependent exponential ARX (Exp-ARX) model, which can effectively describe the nonlinear properties of the plants, is presented. The Exp-ARX model requires only off-line identification. Based on the model, a constrained multivariable generalized predictive control (CMGPC) strategy is designed and implemented in a simulation of 375 MW thermal power plants. This CMGPC algorithm does not resort to on-line parameter estimation and can more exactly predict the future outputs of the nonlinear plants, so it shows better reliability and control performance than the usual GPC algorithm.     

Temperature-controlled molecular dynamics study on velocity-dependent threshold behavior of dynamic nano-friction

Laws of dynamic nano-friction (i.e., continuous wearless friction) were searched for under steady spatial distributions of the local quasi-temperature, by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The temperature control of the non-conservative model was carried out by extending the isothermal MD method using the Nosé–Poincaré thermostat. The results suggested that the threshold phenomenon characterizes sliding-velocity dependence of the nano-frictional force between crystal lattices constituting a nano-electromechanical system (NEMS). This phenomenon was turned out to be a universal feature, whether heat transfer to the environment exists or not.