Radiation effects in a model ceramic for nuclear waste disposal

The safe immobilization of nuclear waste in geological repositories is one of the major scientific challenges facing humanity today. Crystalline ceramics hold the promise of locking up actinides from nuclear fuel and excess weapons plutonium in their structure thereby isolating them from the environment. This paper presents the atomistic details of radiation damage in a model ceramic, zircon.     

Parameter identification for nonlinear systems: Guaranteed confidence regions through LSCR

In this paper we consider the problem of constructing confidence regions for the parameters of nonlinear dynamical systems. The proposed method uses higher order statistics and extends the LSCR (leave-out sign-dominant correlation regions) algorithm for linear systems introduced in Campi and Weyer [2005, Guaranteed non-asymptotic confidence regions in system identification. Automatica 41(10), 1751-1764. Extended version available at 〈http://www.ing.unibs.it/∼campi〉]. The confidence regions contain the true parameter value with a guaranteed probability for any finite number of data points. Moreover, the confidence regions shrink around the true parameter value as the number of data points increases. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated on some simple examples.     

How to protect exchanged secrets in the fair exchange protocol with off-line TTP

The most efficient approach to a fair exchange is to use an off-line trusted third party (TTP for short) who gets involved only when a dispute between two parties occurs. However, exchanged secrets that are not protected properly may be exposed to the TTP when one of these two parties asks the TTP to mediate the dispute. The first work to protect exchanged secrets from TTP’s misuse was proposed by Franklin and Reiter in 1997. They provided an on-line semi-trusted third party instead of an off-line third party for a fair exchange. Their schemes forced the TTP to take part in the protocol for all the cases, and thus, deemed to be impractical.The present paper, introduces several models, including single and multiple TTPs, to focus the attention not only on security properties, but also on reliability functions. In the single TTP mode, our new scheme can protect the exchanged data through an efficient exchange protocol, whereas in the multiple TTP mode, we proposed an approach to balance the security level with the reliability of the system.     

An efficient controller structure with minimum roundoff noise gain

Based on a polynomial operator approach, a new sparse controller structure is derived, which is actually an improved version of the recently proposed structure [Li, G. (2004). A polynomial-operator-based DFIIt structure for IIR filters. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, 51, 147-151]. The performance of the proposed structure is analyzed by deriving the corresponding expression of roundoff noise gain and the problem of finding optimized sparse structures is solved efficiently with a genetic algorithm (GA). A numerical example is given, which shows that the newly developed structure can achieve much better performance than some well-known structures and particularly outperforms the traditional optimal fully parametrized realization greatly in terms of reducing roundoff noise and implementation complexity.     

Physical design of the VCI wrappers for the on-chip packet-switched network named SPIN

This paper presents the physical design methodology of the VCI/SPIN wrappers. The challenge was the validation of the wrappers’ specification with Alliance CAD Tools.A wrapper is a standard gateway used by a subscriber to access an interconnect. Because there are as many wrappers as subscribers, it is relevant to have an estimation of the wrapper’s area, its frequency and then compare these results to the router’s.The interest to perform this study with academic tools is to show that commercial tools are not the unique way for experimentations.     

A rule-based approach for robust clump splitting

This paper presents a robust rule-based approach for the splitting of binary clumps that are formed by objects of diverse shapes and sizes. First, the deepest boundary pixels, i.e., the concavity pixels in a clump, are detected using a fast and accurate scheme. Next, concavity-based rules are applied to generate the candidate split lines that join pairs of concavity pixels. A figure of merit is used to determine the best split line from the set of candidate lines. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is robust and accurate.     

WIPL: a program for electromagnetic modeling of composite-wire andplate structures

WIPL is a program which allows fast and accurate analysis of antennas. The geometry of any metallic structure (even a very large structure) is defined as a combination of wires and plates. WIPL's analysis features include evaluations of the current distribution, near and far field, and impedance, admittance and s-parameters. The program uses an entire-domain Galerkin method. Efficiency of the program is based on the flexible geometrical model, and sophisticated basis functions. In this paper, the basic theory implemented in the program, and some results concerning TV UHF panel antennas and large horn antennas are given     

ID-based threshold decryption secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack

This paper proposes an identity-based threshold decryption scheme IB-ThDec and reduces its security to the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem. Compared with previous work, this conceals two pairing computations in the ciphertext validity verification procedure. The formal proof of security of this scheme is provided in the random oracle model. Additionally, we show that IB-ThDec can be applied to the threshold key escrow and the mediated cryptosystems.     

A region-based selective optical flow back-projection for genuine motion vector estimation

Motion vector plays one significant feature in moving object segmentation. However, the motion vector in this application is required to represent the actual motion displacement, rather than regions of visually significant similarity. In this paper, region-based selective optical flow back-projection (RSOFB) which back-projects optical flows in a region to restore the region's motion vector from gradient-based optical flows, is proposed to obtain genuine motion displacement. The back-projection is performed based on minimizing the projection mean square errors of the motion vector on gradient directions. As optical flows of various magnitudes and directions provide various degrees of reliability in the genuine motion restoration, the optical flows to be used in the RSOFB are optimally selected based on their sensitivity to noises and their tendency in causing motion estimation errors. In this paper a deterministic solution is also derived for performing the minimization and obtaining the genuine motion magnitude and motion direction.