Search

The current paper discusses the peer review process in journals that publish research papers purveying new science and understandings (scientific journals). Different aspects of peer review including the selection of reviewers, the review process and the decision policy of editor are discussed in details. Here, the pros and cons of different conventional methods of review processes are mentioned. Finally, a suggestion is presented for the review process of scientific papers.

The distortion introduced in the cover image is one of the most important factors influencing image steganography. The lower the distortion is, the higher the quality of the stego image, and thus the higher the resistance to steganalysis would be. This paper proposes an image steganographic method which employs the Hamiltonian paths in order to decrease the distortion produced by the LSB substitution scheme. The proposed method divides the cover image into non-overlapping blocks. For each block, the arrangement of the pixels of the block is first changed according to a Hamiltonian path. Next, the pixels whose LSB is not equal to the secret data are determined. The path that results in minimum distortion is chosen, and its binary code as well as the mismatched pixels are recorded. Repeating this process for all blocks, the pixels that should be modified during data embedding and a binary key that includes the codes of the best Hamiltonian path in all blocks are determined. Then, the new values of the second LSB of the changeable pixels are computed using writing on wet paper approach with regard to the compressed key. Finally, +1 or ?1 is added to each changeable pixel according to the value computed for its second LSB. By this strategy, the distortion of each pixel of the stego image is at most 1. Experimental results evaluated on 2000 natural images reveal that the proposed method can significantly decrease the image distortion and thus enhance security.

The goal of this paper is introducing the citer-success-index (cs-index), i.e. an indicator that uses the number of different citers as a proxy for the impact of a generic set of papers. For each of the articles of interest, it is defined a comparison term--which represents the number of citers that, on average, an article published in a certain period and scientific field is expected to "infect"--to be compared with the actual number of citers of the article. Similarly to the recently proposed success-index (Franceschini et al. Scientometrics 92(3):621---6415, 2011), the cs-index allows to select a subset of "elite" papers. The cs-index is analyzed from a conceptual and empirical perspective. Special attention is devoted to the study of the link between the number of citers and cited authors relating to articles from different fields, and the possible correlation between the cs- and the success-index. Some advantages of the cs-index are that (i) it can be applied to multidisciplinary groups of papers, thanks to the field-normalization that it achieves at the level of individual paper and (ii) it is not significantly affected by self citers and recurrent citers. The main drawback is its computational complexity.

We report the transient memory device by means of a water soluble SSG (solid sodium with glycerine) paper. This material has a hydroscopic property hence it can be soluble in water. In terms of physical security of memory devices, prompt abrogation of a memory device which stored a large number of data is crucial when it is stolen because all of things have identified information in the memory device. By utilizing the SSG paper as a substrate, we fabricated a disposable resistive random access memory (RRAM) which has good data retention of longer than 106 seconds and cycling endurance of 300 cycles. This memory device is dissolved within 10 seconds thus it can never be recovered or replicated. By employing direct printing but not lithography technology to aim low cost and disposable applications, the memory capacity tends to be limited less than kilo-bits. However, unlike high memory capacity demand for consumer electronics, the proposed device is targeting for security applications. With this regards, the sub-kilobit memory capacity should find the applications such as one-time usable personal identification, authentication code storage, cryptography key, and smart delivery tag. This aspect is attractive for security and protection system against unauthorized accessibility.

ISO brightness, fluorescence spectra, and the fluorescence integrated intensity of papers from domestic and foreign manufacturers were studied. The contrast index of the tested paper samples, which is defined as the ratio of the ISO brightness to the paper integrated fluorescence intensity in the spectral range from 380 to 700 nm, was estimated. An alternative method for controlling the paper background fluorescence level was proposed.

According to the growth of mobile technology, people experience high-performance mobile devices. In this environment, processing in real-time is required for mobile application. For colored paper mosaic application on mobile devices, the problem regarding speed must be solved while maintaining high-quality. In this paper, we propose an accelerated method that generates tiles based on their position. We locate tiles by considering the edges of the image and the shapes of neighbor tiles. The shape of the tiles is determined based on the position of each tile. In addition, we display the generation process of a result for our method be seemed real-time method. In here, we propose an ordering method that is similar to the ordering method of humans by considering color, edge, distance and direction.

In papers in areas such as engineering and the physical sciences, figures, tables and formulae are the basic elements to communicate the authors' core ideas, workings and results. As a computational text-matching tool, CrossCheck cannot work on these non-textual elements to detect plagiarism. Consequently, when comparing engineering or physical sciences papers, CrossCheck may return a low similarity index even when plagiarism has in fact taken place. A case of demonstrated plagiarism involving engineering papers with a low similarity index is discussed, and editor's experiences and suggestions are given on how to tackle this problem. The case shows a lack of understanding of plagiarism by some authors or editors, and illustrates the difficulty of getting some editors and publishers to take appropriate action. Consequently, authors, journal editors, and reviewers, as well as research institutions all are duty-bound not only to recognize the differences between ethical and unethical behavior in order to protect a healthy research environment, and also to maintain consistent ethical publishing standards.

Media-embedded target, or MET, is an iconic mark printed in a blank margin of a page. The mark indicates that a media link is associated with a nearby region of the page. It guides the user to capture a predefined larger region beyond the mark to ensure that the system can retrieve the associated link reliably with enough natural visual features in the captured region. The target also serves to indicate page regions with media. To use an MET, users align the target on paper with a sight of the same shape on the mobile phone display. When the system detects correct alignment, the image is automatically captured by the phone’s camera. Compared to related approaches, an MET provides an indication for the availability of a link without a major visual impact on the page. We compare the use of MET for guiding capture with two standard methods: one that uses a logo to indicate that media content is available and text to define the capture region and another that explicitly indicates the capture region using a visible boundary mark.

Communication networks are constructed as a multilevel stack of infrastructure, protocols, and mechanisms: links and nodes, topology, routing paths, interconnected realms (ASs), end-to-end transport, and application interaction. The resilience of each one of these levels provides a foundation for the next level to achieve an overall goal of a resilient, survivable, disruption-tolerant, and dependable Future Internet. This paper concentrates on three critical resilience disciplines and the corresponding mechanisms to achieve multilevel resilience: redundancy for fault tolerance, diversity for survivability, and connectivity for disruption tolerance. Cross-layering and the mechanisms at each level are described, including richly connected topologies, multipath diverse routing, and disruption-tolerant end-to-end transport.

Competitive environments in which individuals compete for mutually-exclusive outcomes require rational decision making in order to maximize gains but often result in poor quality heuristics. Reasons for the greater reliance on lose-shift relative to win-stay behaviour shown in previous studies were explored using the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors and by manipulating the value of winning and losing. Decision-making following a loss was characterized as relatively fast and relatively inflexible both in terms of the failure to modulate the magnitude of lose-shift strategy and the lack of significant neural modulation. In contrast, decision-making following a win was characterized as relatively slow and relatively flexible both in terms of a behavioural increase in the magnitude of win-stay strategy and a neural modulation of feedback-related negativity (FRN) and stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) following outcome value modulation. The win-stay/lose-shift heuristic appears not to be a unified mechanism, with the former relying on System 2 processes and the latter relying on System 1 processes. Our ability to play rationally appears more likely when the outcome is positive and when the value of wins are low, highlighting how vulnerable we can be when trying to succeed during competition.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to present to the readers of the Springer Journal on Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing (ALOG) a selection of the papers from the 4th edition of the Latin America Symposium on Circuits and Systems—LASCAS 2013, held in February 2013 in the historical Peruvian city of Cuzco. The LASCAS Symposium is the premier event in circuits and systems in that region of the Americas. The papers selected by the Guest Editors fall in the focus of this Journal, and are among the 10 % top quality of the 155 papers submitted to LASCAS 2013, and were selected by rigorous reviewing. While LASCAS contemplates applications and digital systems, most of the papers in this Special Issue address analog circuits and systems, the themes of interest to ALOG Journal readers. From the 119 papers which were accepted and published in the IEEE LASCAS Proceedings, a total of 27 works were nominated and invited to submit a substantially improved manuscript on the same subject to this Special Issue of LASCAS 2013. The quality screening took advantage of the reviews and paper ratings for each of those 119 papers, which were narrowed down to 23 extended manuscripts. These went through a second-round of peer-review process and 14 papers, substantially extended versions from the LASCAS Symposium, were finally selected for this Special Issue, as the highlights from the flagship Latin American Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The papers in this Special Issue come from the Americas (North and South) and Europe. The 14 selected papers cover a wide range of topics, from analog circuits design at ultra-low voltages, to amplifiers design, integrated circuits, wireless, and digital systems design, and up to topics at the application of communications and arithmetic circuits. The first 3 papers in the Special Issue deal with low voltage analog CMOS design. The paper ‘‘Fully Integrated Inductive Ring Oscillators Operating at VDD below 2kT/ q’’ by M. Machado et alli presents oscillators with two inductive loading schemes to work under extremely low DC supplies. H. Hernandez et alli propose and show in their paper a silicon implementation of ‘‘A fully Integrated Boost Converter For Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting’’ which upconverts from very low voltage supplies. The paper ‘‘Sub-1 V Band-Gap Based and MOS ThresholdVoltage Based Voltage References in 0.13 lm CMOS’’ by D.M. Colombo et alli explores and compares low-voltage DC reference circuits with different circuit approaches possible in standard CMOS, compared to diode-based BGRs. Two papers on DC and instrumentation amplifiers designs target improvements on either DC gain or CMRR. H. Gomez-Ortiz introduces a ‘‘Robust to PVT Enhanced DC Gain Amplifier Using No Miller Capacitor Feedforward Compensation’’ in his paper, where a feedforward scheme improves DC gain and common mode range. C. Silva-Cardenas Maestria de Ingenieria de las Telecomunicaciones, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Ave. Universitaria 1801, Lima 32, Peru e-mail: csilva@pucp.edu

This special issue of Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing presents the extended versions of selected papers from the 31th NORCHIP conference which was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, November 11–12, 2013. The 31th NORCHIP conference had 56 registered participants and 45 papers were presented during the 2 days the conference lasted whereof 30 papers were presented in 10 oral lecture sessions in two tracs, 12 papers were presented in two poster sessions, the 3 presentation, in session on Education and Training. The 3 invited presentations (first—Romualdas Navickas, ‘‘Self-formation in high speed integrated circuits’’, second—Petar Popovski, ‘‘Wireless technologies competing for a seat in the 5G bandwagon’’, and third—Ville Eerola, ‘‘Correlator design and implementation for GNSS receivers’’) were given. However, more submissions are originating from the local area of the conference (only one accepted paper was from a non-European country). From the contributed papers nine papers have been selected for this special issue. The selection of the papers for this special issue is based on quality criteria and they reflect the topics in analog circuit design highlighted during the conference, the feedback of the session chairs and the selected papers all contain contributions that will be of interest to the reader. The papers are briefly introduced below. The two first papers present two RF amplifiers. In the first paper ‘‘Triple Cascaded Current-Reuse Low Noise Amplifier’’ Muh-Dey Wei, Sheng-Fuh Chang, Renato Negra present a triple cascaded current-reuse CMOS low noise amplifier (LNA) for 3.5 GHz WiMAX application. Three commonsource amplifiers are stacked and reuse the same current. This triple cascaded topology is able to enhance power gain but needs two coupling networks which costs enormous chip size. In order to have reasonable chip size, two coupling methods are investigated. For obtaining simultaneous input and noise matching, an additional capacitor is employed to adjust quality factor and reduce the gate induced current noise. The proposed chip is implemented in 180 nm CMOS technology. The measurement results show a maximum power gain of 21.7 dB and minimum noise figure of 3.11 dB. The chip size is 1.05 9 0.93 mm including all pads and the power consumption is 5.16 mW with a supply voltage of 1.5 V. In the second paper ‘‘A 1 V Power Amplifier for 81–86 GHz E-band’’ authors Tobias Tired, Henrik Sjoland, Carl Bryant and Markus Tormanen describe the design and layout of a two stage SiGe E-band power amplifier using a stacked transformer for output power combination. In EMsimulations with ADS Momentum, at E-band frequencies, the power combiner consisting of two individual single turn transformers performs significantly better than a single 2:1 transformer with two turns on the secondary side. Imbalances in the stacked transformer structure are reduced with tuning capacitors for maximum gain and output power. At 84 GHz the simulated loss of the stacked transformer is as low as 1.35 dB, superseding the performance of an also presented alternative power combiner. The power combination allows for a low supply voltage of 1 V, which is beneficial since the supply can then be shared between the power amplifier and the transceiver, thereby eliminating the need of a separate voltage regulator. To improve the gain of the two-stage amplifier it employs a capacitive cross-coupling technique not yet seen in mm-wave SiGe Pas. Capacitive cross-coupling is an effective technique for gain enhancement but is also sensitive to process variations as shown by Monte Carlo simulations. To mitigate this two R. Navickas (&) Department of Computer Engineering, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Naugarduko str. 41, r. 437, 03227 Vinius, Lithuania e-mail: romualdas.navickas@vgtu.lt

International audience; IEEE 802.15.3 High data rate wireless personal area networks (HDR WPANs) have been developed to communicate with devices within 10 m at high speed. A mesh network made up of a parent piconet and several child piconets can support multi-hop communications. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been expected to be the ultimate solution for the next decade wireless networking, showing rapid progress and many new inspiring applications. The international standardization organizations formed working groups to address the problem of standardization for WMNs. These groups were the IEEE 802.15.5 (mesh extensions for WPANs),the IEEE 802.11s (mesh extensions for WLANs), and the IEEE 802.16a (mesh extensions for WiMAX). The IEEE 802.15.5 standard is the standard which defines specifications for including multi-hop functionality in the legacy 802.15.3 and 802.15.4 low data rate (LDR) WPAN networks. The impetus for a WPAN to operate in a mesh topology is to increase the network coverage without increasing the transmit power, to increase the route reliability via route redundancy, self-configuration, and efficient use of device battery life. In the case of meshed WPANs, multiple WPAN clusters compete for channel time in a shared superframe. Therefore, it is essential to determine the channel time requirements of each cluster with a certain number of devices and to determine how these clusters can compete to the shared channel time. In this paper, we investigate the different resource allocation mechanisms related to the meshed HDR WPANs for the 802.15.3 and the 802.15.5 standards. We introduce the single hop and the multi-hop IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN architectures. This is followed by the introduction of the IEEE 802.15.5 standard that provides the mesh capabilities for extending the coverage area of HDR WPANs. The current on-going research issues for resource allocation, including beacon interference, reservation collision etc., in both meshed 802.15.3 and 802.15.5 are alluded to.

We propose a method for selecting the research guarantor when papers are co-authored. The method is simply based on identifying the corresponding author. The method is here applied to global scientific output based on the SCOPUS database in order to build a new output distribution by country. This new distribution is then compared with previous output distributions by country but which were based on whole or fractional counting, not only for the total output but also for the excellence output (papers belonging to the 10 % most cited papers). The comparison allows one to examine the effect of the different methodological approaches on the scientific performance indicators assigned to countries. In some cases, there was a very large variation in scientific performance between the total output (whole counting) and output as research guarantor. The research guarantor approach is especially interesting when used with the excellence output where the quantity of excellent papers is also a quality indicator. The impact of excellent papers naturally has less variability as they are all top-cited papers.

This paper proposes h l -index as an improvement of the h-index, a popular measurement for the research quality of academic researchers. Although the h-index integrates the number of publications and the academic impact of each publication to evaluate the productivity of a researcher, it assumes that all papers that cite an academic article contribute equally to the academic impact of this article. This assumption, of course, could not be true in most times. The citation from a well-cited paper certainly brings more attention to the article than the citation from a paper that people do not pay attention to. It therefore becomes important to integrate the impact of papers that cite a researcher's work into the evaluation of the productivity of the researcher. Constructing a citation network among academic papers, this paper therefore proposes h l -index that integrating the h-index with the concept of lobby index, a measures that has been used to evaluate the impact of a node in a complex network based on the impact of other nodes that the focal node has direct link with. This paper also explores the characteristics of the proposed h l -index by comparing it with citations, h-index and its variant g-index.

The 13th International Conference on Optical Communications andNetworks—IEEE ICOCN2014 (http:// http://www. ontrc.org/icocn/) was held in Suzhou on November 9–10, 2014. IEEE ICOCN aims to provide a premier opportunity for professionals, experts, engineers, scientists, and industrial people worldwide in the field of research, development, and applications of photonics to share and exchange their experience. IEEE ICOCN 2014 included three technical tracks: (1) optical networks, (2) optical transmission subsystems and techniques, and (3) photonic devices and integration. IEEE ICOCN 2014 was a two-day event organized by Optical Network Technology Research Center (ONTRC) in School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Soochow University. IEEE ICOCN 2014 was technically sponsored by IEEE Photonics Society. The conference was also supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China

New tool joins a growing collection of software for accessing fee-for-view scientific literature.

The 18th International Conference on Optical Networks Design and Modeling—ONDM 2014 (http://ondm2014.ict. kth.se)—was held in Stockholm, Sweden, on May 19–22, 2014. ONDM is one of the premier venues in Europe for the optical network community to meet and exchange ideas. Following on the tradition set by its past editions, ONDM 2014 addressed cutting-edge research in optical networks, as well as topics where optical networks meet other areas and disciplines, such as softwaredefined networking (SDN), fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), and future internet design. ONDM2014was a three and a half day event organized by the Optical Networks Laboratory (ONLab) in the School of Information and Communication Technology, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. ONDM 2014 was technically cosponsored by IFIP TC 6 (working group 6.10), by the IEEE Photonics Society, and by the IEEE Communication Society with the endorsement of TAOS and ONTC. The conference was also supported by EricssonAB, the IEEESwedishChapter, the FP7 project DISCUS, the Swedish Research Council, and the City of Stockholm. More than 100 high-quality technical papers were submitted by researchers from 30 countries all over the world.

Paper is an underrated medium in multimedia technology. Rather than showing printed information only, it can also be used for creating real paper models from virtual objects by means of glue and scissors. This requires to compute a planar cut-out sheet from a 3D model. However, faces forming a model in 3D will often overlap once unfolded. While 3D space leaves much possibility for a non-intersecting topology of faces, they tend to intersect easily in the planar projection of the cut-out sheet. But overlaps are not the only problem. In some cases, neighboring faces enclose such a small angle that they are difficult to cut out and glue together. Unfolding a virtual model involves to decide which edges of a 3D model to cut first. A carefully chosen order can help to avoid the above mentioned problems in many cases. Finding the optimal order, however, is an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we develop and analyze a number of strategies that generate sheets which can be crafted easily and which yield high quality results.

Online test paper generation (Online-TPG) generates a test paper automatically online according to user specification based on multiple assessment criteria, and the generated test paper can then be attempted online by user. Online-TPG is challenging as it is a multi-objective optimization problem that is NP-hard, and it is also required to satisfy the online generation requirement. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-objective optimization approach based on the divide-and-conquer memetic algorithm (DAC-MA) for Online-TPG. Instead of solving the multi-objective constraints simultaneously, the set of constraints is divided into two subsets of relevant constraints, which can then be solved separately and effectively by evolutionary computation and local search of DAC-MA. The empirical performance results have shown that the proposed approach has outperformed other TPG techniques in terms of runtime efficiency and paper quality.

We consider the problem of generating balanced training samples from an unlabeled data set with an unknown class distribution. While random sampling works well when the data are balanced, it is very ineffective for unbalanced data. Other approaches, such as active learning and cost-sensitive learning, are also suboptimal as they are classifier-dependent and require misclassification costs and labeled samples, respectively. We propose a new strategy for generating training samples, which is independent of the underlying class distribution of the data and the classifier that will be trained using the labeled data. Our methods are iterative and can be seen as variants of active learning, where we use semi-supervised clustering at each iteration to perform biased sampling from the clusters. We provide several strategies to estimate the underlying class distributions in the clusters and to increase the balancedness in the training samples. Experiments with both highly skewed and balanced data from the UCI repository and a private data set show that our algorithm produces much more balanced samples than random sampling or uncertainty sampling. Further, our sampling strategy is substantially more efficient than active learning methods. The experiments also validate that, with more balanced training data, classifiers trained with our samples outperform classifiers trained with random sampling or active learning.

The rise of Cloud Computing in recent years has generated interest in many small businesses, which aim to take advantage of cloud-based services for their business operations. The Cloud Computing model promises a shift from a small business required to heavily invest in limited resources that are managed internally, to a model where a small business can out-source their business operations to a Cloud service provider, and thus gain access to powerful tools at a much lower cost. This trend in the IT world beckons the following question: is it possible for an SME to run its business operations entirely in the Cloud? The aim of this project was to try and answer this question through secondary research, by investigating: (1) the definition of the Cloud; (2) the composition of the Cloud; (3) what SMEs can accomplish using the Cloud; and, (4) the benefits and drawbacks of running a business in the Cloud. Primary research is also presented. This focused on data gathered from interviews. A survey and a small implementation experiment (to provide further data to answer the main research question) were also conducted, and guidelines were created. Those guidelines provide advice for SMEs, should they wish to implement Cloud-based services in the future.

Most printed material is produced by printing halftone dot patterns. One of the key issues that determine the attainable print quality is the structure of the paper surface, but the relation is non-deterministic in nature. We examine the halftone print quality and study the statistical dependence between the defects in printed dots and the topography measurement of the unprinted paper. The work concerns SC paper samples printed by an IGT gravure test printer. We have small-scale 2D measurements of the unprinted paper surface topography and the reflectance of the print result. The measurements before and after printing are aligned with subpixel resolution, and individual printed dots are detected. First, the quality of the printed dots is studied using Self Organizing Map and clustering and the properties of the corresponding areas in the unprinted topography are examined. The printed dots are divided into high and low print quality. Features from the unprinted paper surface topography are then used to classify the corresponding paper areas using Support Vector Machine classification. The results show that the topography of the paper can explain some of the print defects. However, there are many other factors that affect the print quality, and the topography alone is not adequate to predict the print quality.

Pigmented inks in a microfluidic structure provide a new approach for fabricating bright, colourful electronic paper with a reflectivity of greater than 50%. The challenge now is to combine the scheme with fully functioning drive electronics.

This special issue contains extended articles based on the best papers of the R&D track of the Wireless Innovation Forum’s SDR’11-WinnCommConference on Wireless Communications Technologies and Software Defined Radio (SDR). The Wireless Innovation Forum (previously known as the SDR Forum) was established in 1996. The Wireless Innovation Forum is a non-profit ‘‘mutual benefit corporation’’ dedicated to driving technology innovation in commercial, civil, and defense communications around the world. Forum members bring a broad base of experience in SDR, Cognitive Radio(CR), and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technologies in diverse markets and at all levels of the wireless value chain to address emerging wireless communications requirements through enhanced value, reduced total life cost of ownership, and accelerated deployment of standardized families of products, technologies, and services. The Forum acts as the premier venue for its members to collaborate to achieve these objectives, providing opportunities to network with customers, partners and competitors, educate decision makers, develop and expand markets, and advance relevant technologies. The Technical Conference was first established in 1992 after a highly successful workshop held in 1991. Now attracting a broad range of about 500 delegates including researchers, professors, industry developers, investors, commercial network operators, radio manufacturers, system integrators, government procurement officials, regulators, engineering service providers, and consultants from over 22 different countries, the conference is the only event devoted to the advancement of reconfigurable radio technologies from research through deployment. We are pleased to report that the annual US conference and product exhibition continues to hold its place in the advanced wireless community as the premier event for exploring SDR, CR, and DSA technologies. Last year there was continued strong participation in this conference. In spite of the continuing down turn in the economy in many segments of the market, our papers were downloaded more than 81,000 times. A unique feature of this conference is in providing opportunities to network from a broad mix of participants from all levels of the wireless value chain including investors, commercial network operators, radio manufacturers, system integrators, government procurement officials, regulators, technology providers, engineering service providers, and consultants. Of this group 42 % were researchers and technology developers. From this group of researchers, academically focussed papers are submitted to the Research and Development (R&D) Track of the conference. This year’s paper topics included SDR implementations and architectures, Communications Signal Processing, Physical Layer Techniques, Chip Implementations, GPUs, FPGAs, Processors, RF Technologies, Security, Software Systems, SCA, Spectrum Sharing, CR, System Implementation, and Testing. J. Glossner Optimum Semiconductor Technologies, Inc., 120 White Plains Rd, Tarrytown, NY 10601, USA e-mail: jglossner@optimumsemi.com

The use of wireless technologies for medical device communication, health monitoring (at hospitals or homes) and mobile healthcare information delivery (i.e. m-Health) is one of the most rapidly growing areas in health-IT research today. The papers which appear in this special issue have been carefully selected from the best IEEE PIMRC 2011 conference. They are highlighting various challenging issues in using wireless technology for healthcare applications such as PHY & MAC innovations for wearable and implantable medical sensors, optical communication and location systems in hospital environments and interference mitigation issues.

The purpose of this study is to investigate student designers’ attitude and choices towards the use of computers and paper sketches when involved in a graphic design process. 65 computer graphic technology undergraduates participated in this research. A mixed method study with survey and in-depth interviews was applied to answer the research questions. This result shows that sketches and computers as design tools help students generate ideas in the early stage of design. Students’ preferences to use sketches or computers differ, since each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Although electronic paper that can display monochrome static images has been growing in popularity, the next generation of products will soon be capable of displaying video in full colour. Duncan Graham-Rowe reports.

Terahertz technology is one of the most promising research areas in the 21st century. In this work, we intend to compare the research status quo on terahertz technology between 1990 and 2010 using knowledge domain visualization techniques. Our data consists of 633 patents retrieved from Aureka management platform and 10,344 journal articles indexed in the ISI web of knowledge. Our analysis is a combination of two information visualization tools for analysis, Aureka and CiteSpace. Aureka is allowed for the analysis of patents filed/granted each year, priority country, inventors, assignees, citation counting, and cluster analysis, while networks of co-authors, countries, institutions, document co-citation networks and document co-citation clusters, are performed by CiteSpace. This research provides a comprehensive domain visualization map of innovation and knowledge in the area of terahertz technology. Our result shows that Aureka and CiteSpace are two promising visualization approaches to analyze patents and papers in any given field.

The genesis of the research work presented in this paper constitutes the issue of the effective and efficient recognition of single-source one-time partial discharge (PD) forms that can occur in insulation systems of power transformers. The paper presents research results referring to the use of single-direction neural networks (SNN) for recognizing basic PD forms that can occur in paper-oil insulation impaired by aging processes. The research work results presented show the recognition effectiveness of basic PD forms depending on the descriptor of the analysis of the acoustic emission (AE) signal analysis.

A Cambridge start-up company is opening a large manufacturing facility for organic electronic circuits. The news is expected to accelerate the deployment of electronic-paper displays.

This paper presents a framework for the digitisation, extraction, and graphical representation of paper-based watermark designs embedded in paper texture: there is a growing need for this among librarians and antiquarians to aid with classification and preservation. The system is designed to handle manuscripts with foreground interference and defects; it uses a back-lighting scanning technique combined with image processing operations rather than radioactive techniques. Hence, it is faster, cheaper, safer, and easy to use. The system prototype includes a set of image processing operations which enhance, filter, and extract the watermark shape, and automatically convert it into a graphical representation. The paper focuses also on automated processes which determine the configuration of parameters in order to allow optimal content processing, in addition to the detection of watermark chainlines. With a machine readable graphical representation of the watermark, cataloguing and indexing of these heritage resources can be enhanced with the ease of digital content retrieval functionalities exploiting the advantages of digital technologies such as distribution and preservation.

The effects of tobacco on human health have been widely investigated and documented However, there are not too many specific reports on the potential risk associated to the presence of metals in the paper employed for cigarettes fabrication Even more, there is a lack of national and international norms in this respect. Otherwise, in the literature INAA appears as the unique method for wrapping paper analysis. Therefore, without a nuclear reactor available at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), EDXRF was selected with the aim to explore the possibility to apply this method, instead of INAA, to the analysis of wrapping paper assuming this task, at the beginning, as a supplement to a previous research which was recently presented (2005).1 The analytical work was developed on the wrapping paper of eight of the most known marks of cigarettes in Mexico, in two non-destructive stages: a first survey, by the classical technique of energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF), used a 1 11 GB qradiation source of 238Pu and a SiLi detector. In the absence of standard reference materials for cigarette’s paper, the SRM-1832 and 1833 were required for calibration, a fiberglass air filter was used as a secondary standard. The second stage was performed in a spectrometer TX-2000, anode of Mo, quantification software EDXRF32 (fundamental parameters). This paper presents a comparison of the obtained values with those found in the literature. The results show that the EDXRF method, in the Mo tube version, has the adequate precision and detection limits for the analysis of wrapping paper.

Mobile devices have been used as tools for navigation and geographic information retrieval with some success. However, screen size, glare, and the cognitive demands of the interface are often cited as weaknesses when compared with traditional tools such as paper maps and guidebooks. In this paper, a simple mixed media approach is presented which tries to address some of these concerns by combining paper maps with electronic guide resources. Information about a landmark or region is accessed by waving a handheld computer equipped with an radio frequency identification (RFID) reader above the region of interest on a paper map. We discuss our prototyping efforts, including lessons learned about using RFID for mixed media interfaces. We then present and discuss evaluations conducted in the field and in a comparative, exploratory study. Results indicate that the method is promising for tourism and other activities requiring mobile, geographically-related information access.

We compare Fresco’s analysis of the Turing machine-based notion of computation with that of others, in particular with functional programming and with the reversible computing paradigm of Toffoli and others. We conclude that, although much useful philosophical work can be done by the sort of analysis that Fresco proposes, there is, nevertheless, always likely to be a number of individually viable but different accounts of computation.

In this paper, a non-supervised technique for on-line paper characterisation is presented. The method uses self-organising maps (SOM) and texture analysis for clustering different kinds of paper according to their properties. A light-through technique is used to get pictures of paper. Then, effective texture features are extracted from greyscale images and the dimensionality of the feature data is reduced with SOM allowing visual analysis of measurements. The method makes it possible to implicitly extract important information about paper formation. The approach provides excellent results. A classification error below 1% was achieved for four quality classes when local binary pattern (LBP) texture features were used. The improvement to the previously used texture features in paper inspection is huge: the classification error was reduced by over 40 times. In addition to the excellent classification accuracy, the method also offers a self-intuitive user interface and a synthetic view of the inspected data.

Publishers would need to join forces to apply image-checking software across the literature. Publishers would need to join forces to apply image-checking software across the literature.

With the emergence of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), map acquisition and recognition have become hotly pursued topics, both by the industry and the academia. The paper presents a novel methodology for the extraction and recognition of symbol features from topographic maps. The method proceeds by separating the map into its constituent layers and then attempting to recognize the features in different layers on the basis of symbol-specific geometrical and morphological attributes. Text strings have also been separated. The output is obtained in the form of an ‘e-map’ that is vectorized and hence is suitable for GIS. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed system a simple database along with a query processing facility is constructed integrating the information obtained from the e-map and ‘some’ user inputs. The methodology has been observed to perform quite satisfactorily.

The VLDB conference is a premier venue for presenting advances in the research and practice of data management. The VLDB 2014 conference took place in Hangzhou, China, in September 2014. Papers for the VLDB conference are chosen through a year-round reviewing process with cutoff dates for conference inclusion. The VLDB 2014 conference roughly coincidedwithVolume7ofPVLDB,which received695 submissions. Of these, 139 were accepted, but 21 were accepted too late for inclusion inVLDB2014. The remaining 118were presented at VLDB 2014. In addition, there were 47 papers from PVLDB Vol. 6 presented at VLDB 2014, for a total of 165 papers. A best paper committee, comprising Dimitris Papadias (Chair), Jayant Haritsa, and Kian-Lee Tan, chose seven papers out of these 165 to invite for inclusion in VLDB Journal. Of these seven, five papers were finally accepted in extended form for publication in this special issue, after two additional rounds of review. These papers provide a nice sampling of the rich frontier of database research today, touching upon five high points, each in a very distinct sub-area. In today’s era of Big Data, Hadoop-style map-reduce implementations are everywhere. However, these implementations make strong assumptions about the structure of the data and the computation, rendering them unsuitable for many practical situations. The epiC system, described in epiC: an Extensible and Scalable System for Processing Big Data by Dawei Jiang, Sai Wu, Gang Chen, Beng Chin Ooi and Kian-Lee Tan, overcomes these limitations through an

32nd Norchip Conference was held at Tampere, Finland in October 2014. The Nordic Microelectronics event has been the annual meeting-place of Nordic IC and ASIC designers since 1983, when it was first held in Copenhagen. Already in early 1980s MPW runs were constantly arranged for Nordic research institutes and this helped to educate the designers needed for the 1990s telecommunication boom, for example. Since 1992 Springer (initially Kluwer) has published a special issue containing the best papers of the conference. Now Norchip conference is following the path of ESSCIRC: due to gradually reducing number of attendants, it will change to a combined conference with a bit broader scope. In 2015 the meeting will not be called Norchip anymore, but joined together with SoC conference, it will continue under a name of NORCAS (IEEE Nordic Circuits and Systems Conference). So NORCHIP is signing out, but warmly welcomes NORCAS to continue as a meeting forum of IC and ASIC designer. Interested readers are welcomed to read a short history of the conference at http:// www.norchip.org/NORCHIP_HISTORY.htm and submit their papers to NORCAS (http://www.norcas.org/). The strength of Norchip has always been that it has plenty of presentations showing fabricated and tested circuits. For this special issue I chose eight interesting papers that I’ll introduce now briefly. ‘‘Integrated Reconfigurable High-Voltage Transmitting Circuit for CMUTs’’ by Muntal et al. presents a highvoltage driver circuit for capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUT). Implementing a large array of transducers for a portable ultrasound scanner forced the designers to minimize the power needed in the level translating circuit and carefully choosing proper type of transistors for the partially high-voltage application. ‘‘A 4 9 128 SPAD array with a 78-ps 512-Channel TDC for time-gated pulsed Raman spectroscopy’’ by Nissinen et al. is another high-voltage application, where pn diodes are biased in avalanche breakdown region to implement very high-gain photo-receivers, where a single photon is sufficient for triggering a timing pulse in a complete long-range, low-power laser radar. ‘‘Integrated 16-Channel Neural Recording and Stimulation Circuit’’ by Kursu et al. shows the implementation of a system for real-time recording of neural signals that may eventually help us to understand what cockroaches really think about human beings or life in general. ‘‘A novel cascading scheme to improve the performance of voltage multiplier circuits’’ by Chouchan et al. is a timely implementation of an RF energy harvester circuit operating at 433 MHz. The active rectifying circuit was modified to give higher efficiency at high input powers. ‘‘A 28 GHz SiGe PLL for an 81–86 GHz E-band beam steering transmitter and an I/Q phase imbalance detection and compensation circuit’’ by Tired et al. describes a twochip PLL system and preliminary results for controlling the phase of a 80 GHz transmission. It is designed using 1.5 V, 200 GHz SiGe HBT process. ‘‘W-Band Phase Shifter in 28-nm CMOS’’ by Vahdati et al. is another paper related to electrical beam-steering applications. It presents a 4-step controllable, 39 mW, 1-V phase shifter for 80–100 GHz band. & Timo Rahkonen timor@ee.oulu.fi