Preparation of PZT Thin Films by Liquid-Source MOCVD Using of Cyclohexane Solvent

Pb(Zr, Ti)O₃ thin films were grown on 8-inch Ir(111)/SiO₂/Si substrate by a MOCVD system aiming at application utilizing high-density ferroelectric memory (FRAM). Two types of solvents, THF and cyclohexane were used for liquid source delivery. It was found that the ferroelectric properties of the MOCVD-PZT films using cyclohexane solvent were better than them using THF solvent. By choosing cyclohexane as solvent, the MOCVD-PZT thin films showed strong ?111? preferred orientation and the Pt/PZT/Ir capacitors exhibited promising ferroelectric performances, for instance, large switching charge (Qsw) of 56.4 uC/cm².     

Skeleton clustering by multi-robot monitoring for fall risk discovery

This paper tackles the problem of discovering subtle fall risks using skeleton clustering by multi-robot monitoring. We aim to identify whether a gait has fall risks and obtain useful information in inspecting fall risks. We employ clustering of walking postures and propose a similarity of two datasets with respect to the clusters. When a gait has fall risks, the similarity between the gait which is being observed and a normal gait which was monitored in advance exhibits a low value. In subtle fall risk discovery, unsafe skeletons, postures in which fall risks appear slightly as instabilities, are similar to safe skeletons and this fact causes the difficulty in clustering. To circumvent this difficulty, we propose two instability features, the horizontal deviation of the upper and lower bodies and the curvature of the back, which are sensitive to instabilities and a data preprocessing method which increases the ability to discriminate safe and unsafe skeletons. To evaluate our method, we prepare seven kinds of gait datasets of four persons. To identify whether a gait has fall risks, the first and second experiments use normal gait datasets of the same person and another person, respectively. The third experiments consider that how many skeletons are necessary to identify whether a gait has fall risks and then we inspect the obtained clusters. In clustering more than 500 skeletons, the combination of the proposed features and our preprocessing method discriminates gaits with fall risks and without fall risks and gathers unsafe skeletons into a few clusters.     

Cost-Efficient Traffic Aggregation Employing Cross-Layer Shared Protection

Shared protection/restoration is a promising solution for reducing protection resources and is supported at each layer of the current multi-layer networks. Software-defined networking is expected to reduce equipment cost as well as operational cost by orchestrating these shared protection functionalities. However, although protection resource sharing improves link utilization, it sometimes increases the required equipment. Meanwhile, traffic re-aggregation at each layer is an important technique for low volume traffic to utilize the underlying link capacity more efficiently, but re-aggregation also makes it difficult to share protection resources with traffic at lower layers. In this paper, we present multi-layer network design strategy and method that reduce equipment cost by means of both traffic re-aggregation at each layer and protection resource sharing among multiple service traffic at different layers. The strategy first prioritizes traffic re-aggregation at each layer, and then maximally delegates shared protection to lower layers as long as it does not increase the required capacity at the lower layer. Evaluation results from the example three-layer networks confirm that the proposed method can effectively reduce equipment cost compared to the conventional design method. Cost reduction is achieved by leveraging shared protection functions at multiple layers.     

A new solution for splay‐to‐bend transition in OCB mode with a twisted area

Abstract— Quick, stable transition from splay‐to‐bend alignment in optically compensated bend (OCB) mode is crucial for practical use. This has been achieved by surface treating part of a pixel with a chiral dopant to induce a twist alignment while controlling the twist direction. The effectiveness of this new method was confirmed in a prototype TFT‐LCD panel.     

Development of an epileptic seizure prediction algorithm using R–R intervals with self-attentive autoencoder

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that may affect the autonomic nervous system (ANS) from 15 to 20 min before seizure onset, and disturbances of ANS affect R–R intervals (RRI) on an electrocardiogram (ECG). This study aims to develop a machine learning algorithm for predicting focal epileptic seizures by monitoring R–R interval (RRI) data in real time. The developed algorithm adopts a self-attentive autoencoder (SA-AE), which is a neural network for time-series data. The results of applying the developed seizure prediction algorithm to clinical data demonstrated that it functioned well in most patients; however, false positives (FPs) occurred in specific participants. In a future work, we will investigate the causes of FPs and optimize the developing seizure prediction algorithm to further improve performance using newly added clinical data.

     

Fully digital LCoS device for consumer applications

Abstract— This paper presents a new display device, which combines a digital backplane and a vertically aligned nematic liquid‐crystal layer. The device has 1280 × 720 pixels in a 0.7‐in.‐diagonal display area. In this paper, we present the concept of the new device and overview the performance of the device for a rear‐projection television application.     

Character animation creation using hand-drawn sketches

To create a character animation, a 3D character model is often needed. However, since humanlike characters are not rigid bodies, to deform the character model to fit each animation frame is tedious work. Therefore, we propose an easy-to-use method for creating a set of consistent 3D character models from some hand-drawn sketches while keeping the projected silhouettes and features of the created models consistent with the input sketches. Since the character models possess vertexwise correspondences, they can be used for frame-consistent texture mapping or for making character animations. In our system, the user only needs to annotate the correspondence of the features among the input-vector-based sketches; the remaining processes are all performed automatically.     

Synchronous firing and higher-order interactions in neuron pool

The stochastic mechanism of synchronous firing in a population of neurons is studied from the point of view of information geometry. Higher-order interactions of neurons, which cannot be reduced to pairwise correlations, are proved to exist in synchronous firing. In a neuron pool where each neuron fires stochastically, the probability distribution q(r) of the activity r, which is the fraction of firing neurons in the pool, is studied. When q(r) has a widespread distribution, in particular, when q(r) has two peaks, the neurons fire synchronously at one time and are quiescent at other times. The mechanism of generating such a probability distribution is interesting because the activity r is concentrated on its mean value when each neuron fires independently, because of the law of large numbers. Even when pairwise interactions, or third-order interactions, exist, the concentration is not resolved. This shows that higher-order interactions are necessary to generate widespread activity distributions. We analyze a simple model in which neurons receive common overlapping inputs and prove that such a model can have a widespread distribution of activity, generating higher-order stochastic interactions.     

Building more solid bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology.

Introducing the ways of cultivating mental balance, B. A. Wallace and S. L. Shapiro (see record 2006-12925-003) attempted to build bridges between Buddhism and psychology. Their systematic categorization of Buddhist teachings and extensive review of empirical support from Western psychology are valuable for future study. However, it remains a matter of concern that some more profound parts of Buddhist philosophy can be disregarded by focusing only on practical aspects of Buddhism within the context of mental health. In this comment, the authors briefly address four substantial themes to be considered: reality, identity, causality, and logicality. They suggest that the way to interpret Buddhism as techniques for well-being would certainly be viable in encouraging the study of Buddhist teachings in psychology. Yet, such attempts should not result in superficial imports and applications of Buddhist practices but give due weight to the deeper philosophical issues to build more solid bridges between Buddhism and psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motion analysis of a tripod parallel mechanism

A tripod parallel mechanism consists of three links of fixed length and a rigid platform, and these are connected by revolute joints. The platform can achieve sixdegrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) motion by the coordinated movement of the bottom ends of the three links on a horizontal plane. This mechanism has advantages over the more common six extendible parallel manipulators. It has a much larger work space and a simple structure. In this article, we show that the vector analysis for this tripod parallel mechanism and the derivation of the positions of the three bottom ends of the links in an arbitrary attitude of platform can be found by inverse kinematics and the conditions of geometrical constraint. Then, by a numerical simulation, the trajectories of the bottom ends of the three links are shown.