The Nyquist stability criterion in the Nichols chart

The Nyquist stability criterion is a widely used technique for determining in the complex s‐plane the stability of a dynamical system with feedback. This paper presents a practical and comprehensive method to compute the Nyquist stability criterion directly in the Nichols (magnitude/phase) chart. The proposed method also gives guidelines to design controllers to stabilize unstable plants when dealing with frequency domain techniques like the quantitative feedback theory robust control. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A timing controller embedded driver IC with 3.24‐Gbps eDP interface for chip‐on‐glass TFT‐LCD applications

This paper presents a timing controller embedded driver (TED) IC with 3.24‐Gbps embedded display port (eDP), which is implemented using a 45‐nm high‐voltage CMOS process for the chip‐on‐glass (COG) TFT‐LCD applications. The proposed TED‐IC employs the input offset calibration scheme, the zero‐adjustable equalizer, and the phase locked loop‐based bang‐bang clock and data recovery to enhance the maximum data rate. Also, the proposed TED‐IC provides efficient power management by supporting advanced link power management feature of eDP standard v1.4. Additionally, the smart charge sharing is proposed to reduce the dynamic power consumption of output buffers. Measured result demonstrates the maximum data rate of 3.24 Gbps from a 1.1 V supply voltage with a 7.9‐inch QXGA 60‐Hz COG‐LCD prototype panel and 44% power saving from the display system.     

An adaptive generation method for electrophoretic display driving waveform design

Electrophoretic display (EPD) technology is attractive when used for reading devices such as e‐paper because of its paper‐like appearance. EPD driving is more complex than other display technologies such as liquid crystal display or organic light emission diode because the driving result of a pixel strongly depends on the initial display state. The particle size and distribution in the EPD film may vary, even if the initial state is the same. Therefore, the display devices vary between different manufacturing batches. Furthermore, different display modes such as videos, pictures or documents need different driving waveforms to achieve an optimal result. EPD manufacturers need to build a customized driving waveform for every manufacturing batch. This is very inconvenient if new applications on EPD are to be developed. And the workload is huge. In this work, an adaptive method is described for automatically creating EPD driving waveforms to fit different conditions. The central idea of this method is generally adjusting the driving time and the voltage state after getting the feedback from a measurement model. In this method, a new driving waveform is used to reduce refresh time and visual flicker. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can automatically and adaptively generate an EPD driving waveform with reasonable quality.     

Finite‐time asynchronous filtering for discrete‐time Markov jump systems over a lossy network

This paper is concerned with the problem of finite‐time asynchronous filtering for a class of discrete‐time Markov jump systems. The communication links between the system and filter are assumed to be unreliable, which lead to the simultaneous occurrences of packet dropouts, time delays, sensor nonlinearity and nonsynchronous modes. The objective is to design a filter that ensures not only the mean‐square stochastic finite‐time bounded but also a prescribed level of performance for the underlying error system over a lossy network. With the help of the Lyapunov–Krasovskii approach and stochastic analysis theory, sufficient conditions are established for the existence of an admissible filter. By using a novel simple matrix decoupling approach, a desired asynchronous filter can be constructed. Finally, a numerical example is presented and a pulse‐width‐modulation‐driven boost converter model is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Model for Incident Tickets Correlation in Network Management

In Information Technology Service Management (ITSM), network management teams typically use an Incident Ticket System (ITS) as a tool to track, troubleshoot, and coordinate the resolution of network incidents that occur during the daily operation of the network. A well organized ITS may positively impact on the efficiency of the incident management process. Nevertheless, in many cases the handling of tickets by the management team is not completely systematic and may be incoherent and inefficient. This way, irrelevant or redundant tickets for the same incident may be issued, thus creating a redundancy in the system that leads to inefficiencies. In this paper, we suggest a model aimed to correlate redundant tickets in order to reduce the information to a single ticket per incident. We validate the proposed correlation model by evaluating it with two datasets taken from a real ticketing system of a telecommunications network company. Using this model as a basis, we also develop and evaluate a methodology that assesses the efficiency of the management team during the process of tickets creation and management. Based on it, we also get some insights on the performance of the different management groups involved in the ticket creation process. These analyses can be leveraged for improving both the management groups functioning and the policies for the tickets’ creation.     

Rendering of HDR images to improve brightness discrimination

The impression of quality of images can be enhanced on a high dynamic range (HDR) displays. Generally, a conventional 8‐bit image can be processed to an HDR image by inverse tone mapping operators. Among the operators, brightness discrimination mapping by applying brightness adaptation model attempted to mimic the human visual system. In this paper, we use a brightness adaptation model to derive a brightness discrimination mapping algorithm for HDR displays. The proposed algorithm maximizes a function, which represents the local and global brightness discrimination range by exploiting characteristics of the human visual system. Enhancement of details is verified by visualizing HDR images from dark to bright regions. Improvement of dynamic range is quantified by measuring increased discrimination ratio.     

Partial consensus of identical feedforward dynamic systems with input saturations

This paper studies the partial consensus problem for identical feedforward dynamic systems with input saturations. We construct two consensus protocols using the partial‐state information and full‐state information, respectively. Applying a change of coordinates, feedforward system is transformed into the block diagonal form. Then, by utilizing the bounded real lemma and small gain theorem, we solve the partial consensus problem, and the existence of each protocol is derived. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive chatter mitigation control for machining processes with input saturations

Chatter is an unstable nonlinear dynamical phenomenon often encountered in machining operations because of the self‐excitation mechanism, which may lead to overcut or rapid tool wear, and hence, greatly influence the surface quality and productivity in milling operations. Recent years have witnessed an increasing industrial demand of high quality and high efficiency machining. This paper hereby develops a constrained active adaptive control method to mitigate the chatter dynamics with input saturations. To guarantee the feasibility of the proposed approach, moderate stable conditions of the closed‐loop system are afterwards derived by using the LaSalle–Yoshizawa theorem as well. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to show the substantially enlarged stable region in the Lobe Diagram. Thus, the method can be expected to improve the efficiency of milling processes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Media Niche of Electronic Communication Channels in Friendship: A Meta‐Analysis

The current landscape of communication technologies is characterized by a wide variety of choices. As each medium provides different affordances, each may occupy a different niche and be used in different relationships. Drawing on the theory of the niche, we did a meta‐analysis involving 27 effect sizes from 22 independent samples to test the correlation between media selection/use and friendship closeness. Results showed that the 5 communication channels filled 2 different friendship closeness niches. Mobile phone calls and texting had stronger positive correlations with friendship closeness than instant messaging, social network sites, and online gaming. Culture, but not gender, moderated some of these correlations: Friendship closeness had a stronger positive association with SNS use and online gaming in collectivist cultures.     

Decision support system for classifying archaeological pottery profiles based on Mathematical Morphology

We present a decision support system to help archaeologists in classifying wheel-made pottery pieces by its profile. A novel shape characterization method, using Mathematical Morphology, is introduced for this purpose. Each profile is represented as a vector, obtained by sampling the so called morphological curves (erosion, dilation, opening and closing), and Euclidean Distance is used as a similarity measure. We show results of our method applied to a profile database of Iberian Pottery from the upper valley of Guadalquivir River (Spain).