Design and Implementation of an Agent Home Scheme Strategy for Prefetch-Based DSM Systems

In recent years, cluster computing has been widely investigated and there is no doubt that it can provide a cost-effective computing infrastructure by aggregating computational power, communication, and storage resources. Moreover, it is also considered to be a very attractive platform for low-cost supercomputing. Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems utilize the physical memory of each computing node interconnected in a private network to form a global virtual shared memory. Since this global shared memory is distributed among the computing nodes, accessing the data located in remote computing nodes is an absolute necessity. However, this action will result in significant remote memory access latencies which are major sources of overhead in DSM systems. For these reasons, in order to increase overall system performance and decrease this overhead, a number of strategies have been devised. Prefetching is one such approach which can reduce latencies, although it always increases the workload in the home nodes. In this paper, we propose a scheme named Agent Home Scheme. Its most noticeable feature, when compared to other schemes, is that the agent home distributes the workloads of each computing nodes when sending data. By doing this, we can reduce not only the workload of the home nodes by balancing the workload for each node, but also the waiting time. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain about 20% higher performance than the original JIAJIA, about 18% more than History Prefetching Strategy (HPS), and about 10% higher than Effective Prefetch Strategy (EPS).     

Electric contacts inspection using machine vision

Machine vision is an excellent tool for inspecting a variety of industrial items such as textiles, printed circuit boards, electric components, labels, integrated circuits (IC), machine tools and fruits. In this paper, we propose machine vision-based inspection system for electric contact (EC), which are popularly used in switches, breakers and relays, and are important components in the electrical industry. The proposed system consists of three sub-systems, which inspect the top, side, and bottom surfaces of electric contact for different types of defects respectively. The system acquires the digital image of three views and classifies the surface defects including cracks, breaks, and scratches. For each view, this study develops different image pre-processing and feature extraction methods to enhance and detect the surface defects. The proposed system was implemented and verified using 229 samples collected from the EC production lines. Experimental results show the proposed system is effective and efficient in identifying EC defects.     

Application of a remote image surveillance system in a robotic weapon

As one of the major steps toward a fully intelligent autonomous robotic weapon, we have made progress in three major areas, (1) design of the surveillance system by an AVR microcontroller, (2) implementation of the design mechanism, and (3) performance of the human- machine interface surveillance system via the LabVIEW graphical programming environment, so that the supervisor can control the vehicle with a keyboard or a specially adapted mouse. In order to accomplish all these achievements, there have been major additions and overhauls in both system software codes and system circuit board developments. All these developments, including a new algorithm and hardware implementation, are described in this article. The experimental results have shown the practicality of the AVR microcontroller, the LabVIEW graphical programming environment, and ZigBee wireless technology applied to a robotic weapon.     

Complementary sliding control of non-linear systems

In this paper, a novel continuous complementary sliding control was proposed to improve the tracking performance given the available control bandwidth and the extent of parameter uncertainty. With this control law, we have shown that the guaranteed ultimate bound of the tracking error was reduced by half, as compared with the conventional continuous sliding control. The error transient response during the reaching phase has also been remarkably improved by the proposed control. To illustrate its superiority, we presented a composite complementary sliding control scheme for a cascade uncertain non-linear system, which includes the benchmark non-linear problem, TORA. Simulation results on TORA showed good responses to any initial conditions and to single-frequency sinusoidal disturbances.     

A new composite adaptive speed controller for induction motor basedon feedback linearization

A new adaptive control technique is proposed to control the speed of the induction motor in this paper. First, the rotor flux is estimated with the simplified rotor flux observer on the rotor reference frame and the feedback linearization theory is used to decouple the rotor speed and the flux amplitude. Then, a new composite adaptive control algorithm based on an integral cost function is designed to control the speed of the induction motor. The overall speed control system is verified to be stable and robust to the parameter variations and external disturbances. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach. The good speed tracking and load regulating responses can be obtained by the proposed controller     

A H-QoS-demand personalized home physiological monitoring system over a wireless multi-hop relay network for mobile home healthcare applications

For the elderly and chronic patients with cardiovascular disease who live alone, it is necessary to constantly monitor their physiological parameters, especially the electrocardiogram (ECG), to effectively prevent and control their health condition and even to provide urgent treatment or care while an emergency such as the abnormal variation of heart rate (HR) occurs. In this paper, a wireless in-home physiological monitoring system, based on multi-hop relay communications, which can ubiquitously and continuously monitor the patient's ECG at any time or any place at home without space limit and the “dead spot” due to the extended communication coverage by multi-hop wireless connectivity, is proposed. The system consists of a mobile-care device, which is responsible for capturing and wirelessly sending the patient's ECG data, a wireless multi-hop relay network (WMHRN) that is in charge of relaying the data sent by the former, and a residential gateway (RG), which is responsible for gathering and uploading the received ECG data to the remote care server through the Internet to carry out the patient's health condition monitoring and the management of pathological data. However, in order to assure that the ECG data can be effectively and timely forwarded, from the mobile-care device to the RG through the WMHRN, to meet the healthcare quality of service (H-QoS) demand for reliable and real-time end-to-end ECG transmission, the analysis of WMHRN latency in data-forwarding stage and the deployment consideration of wireless relay nodes are investigated in detail in this work. Moreover, an emergency alert service using short message service (SMS), based on the detection of abnormal variation of HR, is also used in the RG to further enhance the healthcare service quality. A prototype of this system has been developed and implemented. Finally, the experimental results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed system.     

A better technique using multisegment modeling and analysis of high-density and high-speed connectors

A useful and rather new simulation technique for connectors up to 6.25 GHz is presented and discussed in this paper. The proposed model extracts electrical parameters of a connector using time-domain reflectometry (TDR) measurements. A new technique was developed to obtain accurate impedance profiles using TDR and a multisegment approach that is effectively a distributed coupled model. The parameter extraction and characterization of connectors are discussed. The performance of the proposed segmented transmission line model is verified by simulation of the model in SPICE and by experimental measurement. The results show that the proposed model can simulate the electrical characteristics, including crosstalk and impedance, of high-density and high-speed connectors with satisfactory accuracy. Based on the proposed modeling and CAD simulators, the design and analysis of complicated high-density and high-speed connectors can be executed accurately and effectively. Compared with other previous models, the proposed model can significantly improve the accuracy of simulation.     

A new equivalent circuit model of IGBT for simulation of current sensors

A new equivalent circuit model for insulated gate bipolar transistor is presented. It takes into account both electron and hole conduction in sensors and is incorporated with SPICE3 for the simulation of three types of current sensors, namely active, bipolar, and MOS sensors. It adopts a multiMOS model to include the doping variation in the MOS body. The results agree well with the current sensing measurements within an average error of 4.4%.     

Molecular Effects of Low-Intensity Shock Wave Therapy on L6 Dorsal Root Ganglion/Spinal Cord and Blood Oxygenation Level-Dependent (BOLD) Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Changes in Capsaicin-Induced Prostatitis Rat Models

Neurogenic inflammation and central sensitization play a role in chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome. We explore the molecular effects of low-intensity shock wave therapy (Li-ESWT) on central sensitization in a capsaicin-induced prostatitis rat model. Male Sprague–Dawley rats underwent intraprostatic capsaicin (10 mM, 0.1 cm³) injections. After injection, the prostate received Li-ESWT twice, one day apart. The L6 dorsal root ganglion (DRG)/spinal cord was harvested for histology and Western blotting on days 3 and 7. The brain blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional images were evaluated using 9.4 T fMRI before the Li-ESWT and one day after. Intraprostatic capsaicin injection induced increased NGF-, BDNF-, and COX-2-positive neurons in the L6 DRG and increased COX-2, NGF, BDNF, receptor Trk-A, and TRPV1 protein expression in the L6 DRG and the dorsal horn of the L6 spinal cord, whose effects were significantly downregulated after Li-ESWT on the prostate. Intraprostatic capsaicin injection increased activity of BOLD fMRI responses in brain regions associated with pain-related responses, such as the caudate putamen, periaqueductal gray, and thalamus, whose BOLD signals were reduced after Li-ESWT. These findings suggest a potential mechanism of Li-ESWT on modulation of peripheral and central sensitization for treating CP/CPPS.