Development of a statistical model to classify driving stress levels using galvanic skin responses

Many studies have demonstrated the strong relationships between physiological responses and driving stress, but they have done little to build a model that could be used to identify a driver's stress accurately in real time. The objective of this study is to develop a model that accurately classifies driving stress by monitoring physiological responses—specifically galvanic skin response (GSR). GSR data were collected from nine drivers with licenses obtained in the US in real road driving situations with two stress conditions—rest period (low stress) and highway or city driving (high stress). The validation drive was performed by one driver with licenses obtained in South Korea in real long‐term road driving situations with two stress conditions—rural area (low stress) and highway or highway under construction (high stress). Those two conditions were used to build a binary logistic regression model to classify low stress or high stress based on a driver's measured hand GSR. The overall classification accuracy of the developed model was found to be 85.3%, and the accuracy of cross validation, with a testing dataset, was found to be 83.2%. A simple logit model was developed to identify drivers' stress by incorporating their GSR data. The developed model can be embedded in a wearable device equipped with GSR sensors for drivers to detect their stress level in real time.     

Adaptive History-Based Memory Schedulers for Modern Processors

Careful memory scheduling can increase memory bandwidth and overall system performance. We present a new memory scheduler that makes decisions based on the history of recently scheduled operations, providing two advantages: It can better reason about the delays associated with complex DRAM structure, and it can adapt to different observed workload.     

Departure process of a single server queueing system with Markov renewal input and general service time distribution

The independence of processes in queueing systems is generally assumed when developing queueing models. However, real systems often involve several process dependencies, and failure to take these into consideration can lead to serious underestimation of the performance measures. We consider herein a single server queueing system with a Markov renewal process (MRP) for its arrival process and a general service time distribution, and derive the distribution function and correlation coefficient of the departure process. Since the departure process also often corresponds to an arrival process in downstream queues, the results obtained here can be used to derive a better approximation of the performance measures of a non-product form general queueing network.     

Removing escrow from ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic primitive for fine-grained access control of distributed data. In ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), each user is associated with a set of attributes and data are encrypted with access policies on attributes. A user is able to decrypt a ciphertext if and only if his attributes satisfy the access policy embedded in the ciphertext. However, key escrow is inherent in ABE systems. A curious key generation center in that construction has the power to decrypt every ciphertext. We found that most of the existing ABE schemes depending on a single key authority suffer from the key escrow problem. In this study, we propose a novel CP-ABE key issuing architecture that solves the key escrow problem. The proposed scheme separates the power of issuing user keys into two parties: the key generation center and the attribute authority. In the proposed construction, the key generation center and the attribute authority issue different parts of secret key components to users through a secure two-party computation protocol such that none of them can determine the whole set of keys of users individually. We demonstrate how the proposed key issuing protocol can be applied in the existing CP-ABE scheme and resolve the key escrow problem.     

A Singularity-free Steering Law of Roof Array of Control Moment Gyros for Agile Spacecraft Maneuver

In this paper, a singularity-free steering law for single gimbal control moment gyros (CMGs) is addressed for agile spacecraft. The geometrical array considered particularly in this work is a roof array due to the simplicity of singularity envelope. A feasible angular momentum chart which can provide a singularity-free bound is employed. The chart allows a guaranteed maximum torque output and angular momentum at any time without concerning the geometrical singularity of the array. Furthermore, a new deterministic allocation algorithm, called half-leading steering logic, of gimbal angular rates, is also suggested instead of the well-known pseudo-inverse technique to meet control torque commands required and to keep away from the singularity. It is noted that a momentum vector recovery to the initial direction is also an important task for the CMG array to overcome the singularity and for the reliable operation of CMGs. An optimization technique is addressed to restore the gimbal vectors back to their original angular position after the attitude reorientation mission. The techniques proposed are demonstrated using illustrative numerical simulations.

     

A study on the development of a substitution process by powder metallurgy in automobile parts

Powder metallurgy processes using sintering are able to form net-shaped products and have been used widely in the production of automobile parts to improve productivity. However, the toughness of powder products is generally poor because they contain pores. Therefore, forged products are used in parts subjected to severe fatigue loads, but in the case of powder products having high toughness, they could substitute for forged products. In this study, the choice of powder materials and production processes, including mixing, compaction, sintering, and heat treatment are studied to produce the clutch disc spline hub of an automobile. For this, three types of materials are selected and processed and the mechanical properties and microstructure of the sample are investigated, along with the performance of a dynamic test carried out under real conditions.     

Usability evaluation of symbols in digital cluster for drivers with color vision deficiency

Universal Access in the Information Society - Digital clusters have been adopted as displays in vehicles, and various driving information is presented through the digital clusters with different...     

A perturbation analysis on solid polymer surfaces

A linear stability model was formulated to analyze the perturbation of solid polymer surfaces. Surface energy and thermal stress were considered as the main variables. The surface tends to more unstable as the temperature increase. This is interpreted as the dominancy of the lattice vacancy diffusion over surface mass diffusion and the increase in thermal stress.     

Characterization of spectral responses of humic substances upon UV irradiation using two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy

The spectral responses of a leaf litter derived humic substance (LLHS) and Suwannee River fulvic acid (SRFA) upon ultraviolet (UV) A irradiation were characterized using two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2D-COS) based on the absorption and the synchronous fluorescence spectra at different irradiation times. A 12 day irradiation on the humic substances (HS) resulted in higher reduction of the absorbance relative to the dissolved organic carbon concentration, suggesting that aromatic chromophores were preferentially oxidized and/or non UV-absorbing compounds were generated by the photobleaching. Synchronous fluorescence spectra revealed the preferential removal of fulvic-like and humic-like fluorophores and delayed response of protein-like fluorescence upon the irradiation. The spectral features at long wavelengths (>430 nm) appear to be affected by intra-molecular interactions of the individual chromophores associated with shorter wavelengths. Absorption-based 2D-COS demonstrated that there are three types of absorption bands for the two HS, which changed sequentially in the order of 290-400 nm → 200-250 nm → 250-290 nm. In addition, two or three distinctive fluorescence bands in response to the irradiation were identified from 2D-COS. The sequential orders and the associated wavelength bands were possibly explained by the irradiation wavelengths and the differences between direct and indirect photochemical reactions. The interpretation of the 2D-COS results was very consistent with the kinetic rate constants individually calculated at several discrete wavelengths. Our study demonstrated that 2D-COS could be used as a powerful tool in identifying distinctive bands of HS that have dissimilar behavior and the associated sequential orders by visualizing the spectral changes at continuous wavelengths.