A Fuzzy Collaborative Assessment Methodology for Partner Trust Evaluation

Trust level assessment within collaborative networks is an interesting issue in the partner evaluation and partner selection literature. This paper proposes a fuzzy collaborative assessment methodology for partner trust evaluation within horizontal collaborative networks. The proposed approach concerns a group evaluation context where a decision‐making comity associated with a manufacturer needs to evaluate its company's partners for their ranking purposes. Different expertise levels are attributed to the comity members. In this paper, trust level is evaluated based on information‐sharing attributes considered in the literature as critical influencing factors. Different weights are associated with these attributes with respect to their corresponding influence on trust. The semantic fuzzy partitioning method is considered for the collaborative trust assessment based on unbalanced linguistic term sets representing information‐sharing attributes. The developed approach is applied to a real case showing its effectiveness and its objectivity.     

Hot carrier reliability of RF N- LDMOS for S Band radar application

This paper presents an innovative reliability bench specifically dedicated to high RF power device lifetime tests under pulse conditions for radar application. A base-station dedicated LDMOS transistor has been chosen for RF lifetests and a complete device electric characterization has been performed. A whole review of its critical electrical parameters after accelerated ageing tests is proposed and discussed. This study tend to explain the physical degradation mechanisms occurred during RF life-tests by means of 2D ATLAS-SILVACO simulations. Finally, the paper demonstrates that N-LDMOS degradation is linked to hot carriers generated interface states (traps) and trapped electrons, which results in a build up of negative charge at Si/SiO2 interface. More interface states are created at low temperature due to a located maximum impact ionization rate at the gate edge.     

Assessment of indoor HONO formation mechanisms based on in situ measurements and modeling

The photolysis of HONO has been found to be the oxidation driver through OH formation in the indoor air measurement campaign SURFin, an extensive campaign carried out in July 2012 in a classroom in Marseille. In this study, the INCA‐Indoor model is used to evaluate different HONO formation mechanisms that have been used previously in indoor air quality models. In order to avoid biases in the results due to the uncertainty in rate constants, those parameters were adjusted to fit one representative day of the SURFin campaign. Then, the mechanisms have been tested with the optimized parameters against other experiments carried out during the SURFin campaign. Based on the observations and these findings, we propose a new mechanism incorporating sorption of NO₂ onto surfaces with possible saturation of these surfaces. This mechanism is able to better reproduce the experimental profiles over a large range of conditions.     

Automatic speech recognition system for Tunisian dialect

Although Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and used in written communication and TV/radio broadcasts, all informal communication is typically carried out in dialectal Arabic. In this work, we focus on the design of speech tools and resources required for the development of an Automatic Speech Recognition system for the Tunisian dialect. The development of such a system faces the challenges of the lack of annotated resources and tools, apart from the lack of standardization at all linguistic levels (phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical) together with the mispronunciation dictionary needed for ASR development. In this paper, we present a historical overview of the Tunisian dialect and its linguistic characteristics. We also describe and evaluate our rule-based phonetic tool. Next, we go deeper into the details of Tunisian dialect corpus creation. This corpus is finally approved and used to build the first ASR system for Tunisian dialect with a Word Error Rate of 22.6%.     

Comparative analysis of RF LDMOS capacitance reliability under accelerated ageing tests

This paper presents the results of comparative reliability study of C–V characteristics through three accelerated ageing tests for stress applied to an RF LDMOS: Thermal shock tests (TST, air–air test), thermal cycling tests (TCT, air–air test) and high temperature storage life (HTSL). The two first tests are carried out with a drain current flowing through the device during stress. The investigation findings of electrical parameter degradations after various ageing tests are discussed. Feedback capacitance (Crs) is reduced by 16% and gate–drain capacitance (Cgd) by 42%. This means that the tracking of these parameters enables to consider the hot carrier injection as the dominant degradation phenomenon. A physical simulation software has been used to confirm qualitatively degradation phenomena.     

The effect of polyvinyl alcohol addition on the physicochemical properties of ZnO synthesized by ethylene glycol-hydrothermal method

The effect of the addition of very small amount of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) on the resulting physicochemical properties of ZnO synthesized by ethylene glycol-hydrothermal method was studied. Significant change in particle size distribution and specific surface area can be observed even only 0.02% PVA (w/w) was added into the ethylene glycol (EG) solution, in which the median particle size distribution increased from 5 to 8 nm and at the same time the specific surface area is also increased to nearly 50%. Further addition of PVA resulted in the decrease of the specific surface area due to the formation of agglomeration and aggregation of particles as observed by FESEM study. This study shows that the presence of minute amount of polymer, PVA plays very crucial role in determining the resulting properties of the synthesized ZnO by EG-hydrothermal method.     

New pulse mode neuro-fuzzy hardware architecture and application to image denoising

This paper focuses on a new digital architecture of pulse mode neuro-fuzzy system (PMNFS) with on-chip learning ability. The main purpose goal is to make use of the outstanding features of neuro-fuzzy in function approximation, and implement a reconfigurable architecture with on-chip learning on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. Details of the whole design with on-chip learning solutions are given. As an application illustrating the efficiency and scalability of the proposed PMNFS, we have considered the approximation of image denoising, which is a very important step in image processing. Experimental results show great efficiency of the proposed method, outperforming other denoising techniques. It was also demonstrated that such a system is strongly adaptive and gives good restored images independently of the kind of noises. Owing to learning, such feature cannot be met with conventional denoising techniques. Design synthesis results on a virtex II PRO FPGA platform are presented. Comparisons with conventional techniques as well as neural ones show higher performances of the designed PMNFS.     

A bipolar implementation of the Beta neuron

The great flexibility of the Beta function and its universal approximation characteristics, make Beta basis function neural networks (BBFNNs) very useful. We present a hardware implementation of the Beta neuron. The proposed circuit was designed by using a standard bipolar technology. PSPICE simulations show the good concordance of the output of our circuit with the analytic Beta function. We also successfully integrated the electronic Beta neuron in the design of a BBFNN that approximates a nonlinear mapping.