Search

This article explores the conception and execution of paper currency schemes in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). Paper currency was widely used as a form of local money in early modern Japan, but has received close to no attention in Anglophone scholarship even amid a recent upsurge in interest in the global history of money. From the perspective of monetary history, Tokugawa paper currency presents an intriguing puzzle. Even as paper currencies repeatedly collapsed in value, they remained in common use as an essential component of the early modern monetary system. Using the case of Sendai domain, a large fiefdom in northeastern Japan, the article argues that the monetary practices and expectations of ordinary subjects transformed paper money, created through partnerships between the samurai ruling class and powerful merchant financiers, from a tool meant to serve the interests of state finances into a low‐denomination currency convenient for everyday transactions, resulting in the bills' surprising longevity as a form of small change. Drawing on approaches that centre the role of non‐state and marginal actors in the making of money, it sheds new light on the political economy of late Tokugawa Japan and offers new insights into the global history of money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frequency‐domain dielectric spectroscopy (FDS) of humid insulating paper has been measured at different temperatures. The data show three independent dielectric processes: electrode polarization, hopping conductivity and interfacial polarization. The dielectric properties of humid insulating paper are composed of hopping conductivity and interfacial polarization, and its equivalent dielectric model can be represented by a Havriliak‐Negami (HN) relaxation branch parallel hopping conductivity. At high temperatures and low frequencies, the measured dielectric spectroscopy bends downward, which is caused by the electrode polarization. In this case, the equivalent dielectric model is composed of the body impedance of insulating paper and the electrode polarization in series. According to the equivalent dielectric model, the components of electrode polarization, hopping conductivity, and interface polarization can be separated, thereby eliminating the parasitic effect of electrode polarization on the dielectric properties of insulating paper. Both of hopping conductivity and interface polarization of insulating paper move toward high‐frequency direction with temperature increasing. For humid insulating paper with a moisture content of 5.9%, the activation energies of hopping conductivity and interface polarization are 1.18 and 0.99 eV, respectively. This difference in activation energies results in the inability of the spectrums of insulating paper to overlap with each other at different temperatures. Based on the insulating paper without oil immersion, the results obtained in this article are not affected by oil or oil‐immersion operations. This provides a reference for exploring the dielectric properties and physical mechanisms of oil‐paper composite insulation materials widely used in high‐voltage equipment. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment of the aging of oil‐paper insulation is analyzed in this article, based on an improved fractional Poynting‐Thomson model, which includes dc and hopping conductivity (P‐T model2). Based on samples of oil paper produced in laboratories with different thermal aging times, it has been found that the proposed improved model provides a better fit and a higher index of coincidence concerning the measured values than the traditional P‐T model and the model that only incorporates the effect of dc conductivity (P‐T model1). Nevertheless, comparing the proposed improved P‐T model with the traditional Cole–Cole (C‐C), Davidson–Cole (D‐C), and Havriliak–Negami (H‐N) models, the improved P‐T model2 also demonstrated a superior fit for the measured value and a higher coincidence index than another model. In addition, there was an excellent exponential relationship between the quantities εa, εb and τ of the improved model and the furfural content of the samples. Consequently, these characteristic quantities could be utilized to estimate the furfural content in the oil‐paper insulation and evaluate the insulation's condition. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earthquake swarms are most commonly composed of small‐magnitude earthquakes. However, a recent study by Yoshida, Uchida, et al. (2023, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL106023) analyzed a swarm beneath the Noto Peninsula in Japan that, after more than two years of moderate‐magnitude seismicity, triggered the moment magnitude (Mw) 6.2 Suzu mainshock in May 2023. Based on high‐precision earthquake locations and a slip inversion of the mainshock, these authors found that the Mw 6.2 Suzu earthquake occurred on the updip extension of a fault that was active during the swarm, likely driven by increased fluid pressure. After publication of that paper, a much larger and more destructive Mw 7.5 event occurred nearby on 1 January 2024. These events underscore the potential for swarms to be precursors to large, damaging earthquakes. Forecasting the eventual evolution of swarms is currently very challenging but could be aided in the future by new observations and models. Plain Language Summary: Although earthquake swarms often only contain small earthquakes, occasionally they can trigger large, damaging earthquakes. Yoshida, Uchida, et al. (2023, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL106023) examined the triggering of a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in Japan, which caused extensive damage, following two years of smaller earthquakes. This sequence, like many swarms, may have been driven by elevated fluid pressure migrating upwards within the crust. After publication of that paper, a much larger and more destructive Mw 7.5 event occurred nearby. Forecasting the eventual evolution of ongoing swarms is currently very challenging but could be aided in the future by new observations and models. Key Points: Earthquake swarms can be precursors to damaging earthquakes, including the 1 January 2024, Mw 7.5 Noto Peninsula, Japan eventFluid pressure changes often drive swarm activity, and their degree of confinement may influence swarm evolutionDirect observations of fluids in fault zones combined with numerical modeling may aid swarm forecasting in the future [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electromagnet coil is mainly composed of enameled wire which wound on the coil skeleton, and the function is to convert the electrical signal into a magnetic signal, which is a very important electric‐magnetic conversion element. When designing the electromagnet coil, usually only the total winding turns and winding inner diameter can be calculated, and the specific design parameters such as the diameter of copper wire, paint layer thickness, and winding turns of each layer can only be selected through experience, indicating that the design method should be improved. In addition, the unreasonable design parameters will seriously affect the power consumption and cost of coil, so it is highly necessary to improve the optimization design method. In order to solve the above problems, an optimization design method for DC electromagnet coil is proposed in this paper. This method simultaneously takes into account both power consumption and manufacturing cost, and can achieve the optimal matching of design parameters. In this paper, the structure of electromagnet coil is introduced, and the theoretical calculation model of resistance is improved first. Then, according to the expected requirements of electromagnet coil for steady current, the optimization design method is proposed and the optimal design parameters are obtained. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed optimization design method is verified by the test platform of electromagnet coil. The results show that the electromagnet coil designed by the optimization design method fully meets the expected requirements. The relevant research results can provide reference for the optimization design of electromagnet coil, which has a certain engineering practical value. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oil‐immersed transformers as one of the most important equipment in the power system, the fault prediction of it in advance can effectively reduce the subsequent harm. Aiming at the selection of input features and data sample imbalance in the transformer fault diagnosis model, this paper adopts the recursive feature elimination (RFE) method combined with SMOTETomek comprehensive sampling method to optimize the above problems. First, RFE is used to traverse all the features and filter the optimal combination of them as input features, then SMOTETomek is used to perform balancing operation on the samples of the train set, and finally, whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is used to find the best hyperparameters for support vector machine (SVM), and the results are compared with the diagnostic models operated without processing and after single processing operation, respectively. After several sets of experiments, it is proved that the optimized comprehensive fault diagnosis model performs better on the test set than both the untreated and the singly processed models, which proves the effectiveness of the methodology used in this paper. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an effective control synthesis strategy to stabilize grid forming converters in the presence of disturbances. The conventional control system for a grid forming converter is based on paralleled and cascaded proportional‐integral (PI) controllers, which are widely used in the industry due to their simplicity and reliability. However, the sequential adjustment of PI gains in different control loops, without consideration of dynamic interconnections limits their performance and capability. To address this limitation, the present paper introduces a control design method based on static output feedback theory. The proposed control scheme reduces the dynamic control design problem to an effective gain scheduling problem. In the proposed methodology, without removing the existing practical control structure, its dynamic parts are moved to the open‐loop system, and simultaneous scheduling of all remaining control gains is achieved during one control design process. MATLAB simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of the designed control system, and compare it with the conventional control one in terms of step response characteristics. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed controller, ensuring system stability and exhibiting improved performance. The proposed control framework provides several advantages, including keeping stability in various disturbance conditions, simultaneous tuning of all control parameters, and no need to change the existing simple control structure. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless power transfer (WPT) technology can completely isolate the equipment from the power supply, and has been widely used. However, the transmission efficiency of WPT system is optimal only as the transmitting coil was completely aligned with the receiving coil. But in practical applications, the mobile devices are all dynamic system, and perfectly alignment of the coils is a very demanding condition. In order to solve this problem, the paper proposed a coil position adaptive adjustment control scheme of WPT system with lateral misalignment or angular misalignment. Firstly, the relationship between transmission efficiency and lateral misalignment and angular misalignment was analyzed. And the research results show that if there is a lateral misalignment between the coils, the transmission efficiency can be optimized by adjusting the angular misalignment. Secondly, based on the hill climbing algorithm, a coil position adaptive adjustment control method was proposed. Finally, a coil position adaptive adjustment WPT system experimental platform was built, and the experimental researches are carried on. The results of the experiment show that as the transfer distance is 0.10 m and the lateral misalignment is 0.12 m, the transfer efficiency can be increased from 38.38% to 55.61% through the proposed control scheme. And the results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of control scheme proposed in the paper. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accumulation of snow is one of the essential reasons for the significant decrease in the power generation efficiency of PV stations in winter. For this reason, this paper firstly provides a detailed review of the current research into the physical processes and shedding reasons for the natural melting of snow on PV module surfaces. Then, several common techniques to promote snow and ice melting on PV surfaces are discussed, and the feasibility and shortcoming of ultrasonic technology in removing high‐density snow and ice are analyzed in detail. Finally, this paper proposes two snow sensing technologies for PV modules, namely, image processing method and interdigital capacitance method. Among them, the image method based on fixed camera and UAV detection is more suitable for wide area PV power stations, while the interdigital capacitance method is helpful in obtaining snow characteristic parameters, such as icing type and LWC. The relevant research has certain reference significance for PV power stations to formulate a more reasonable snow removal plan and power generation forecast. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, together with text and data mining (TDM), introduce complex challenges at the junction of data utilization and copyright laws. The inherent reliance of AI on large quantities of data, often encompassing copyrighted materials, results in multifaceted legal quandaries. Issues surface from the unfeasible task of securing permission from each copyright holder for AI training, further muddled by ambiguities in interpreting copyright laws and fair use provisions. Adding to the conundrum, the clandestine practices of data collection in proprietary AI systems obstruct copyright owners from detecting unauthorized use of their materials. The paper explores the exceptions to copyright laws for TDM in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Japan, recognizing their crucial role in fostering AI development. The EU has a two‐pronged approach under the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, with one exception catering specifically to research organizations, and another, more generalized one, that can be restricted by rightsholders. The UK allows noncommercial TDM research without infringement but rejected a broader copyright exception due to concerns from the creative sector. Japan has the broadest TDM exception globally, permitting the nonenjoyment use of works without permission, though this can potentially overlook the rights of copyright owners. Notably, the applicability of TDM exceptions to AI‐produced copies remains unclear, creating potential legal challenges. Furthermore, an exploration of the fair use doctrine in the United States provides insight into its potential application in AI development. It focuses on the transformative aspect of usage and its impact on the original work's potential market. This exploration underscores the necessity for clear, practical guidelines. In response to these identified challenges, this paper proposes a hybrid model for TDM exceptions emerges, along with recommended specific mechanisms. The model divides exceptions into noncommercial and commercial uses, providing a nuanced solution to complex copyright issues in AI training. Recommendations incorporate mandatory exceptions for noncommercial uses, an opt‐out clause for commercial uses, enhanced transparency measures, and a searchable portal for copyright owners. In conclusion, striking a delicate equilibrium between technological progress and the incentive for creative expression is of paramount importance. These suggested solutions aim to establish a harmonious foundation that nurtures innovation and creativity while honoring creators' rights, facilitating AI development, promoting transparency, and ensuring fair compensation for creators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the semi‐airborne frequency domain electromagnetic detection, strong noise will be generated due to the attitude change of the receiving coil sensor. However, the existing attitude measurement system cannot be directly used in the semi‐airborne frequency domain electromagnetic system because of the requirement on the volume and accuracy of the instrument. In order to reduce the effect of attitude noise, this paper analyzes the cause and influence of attitude noise in the semi‐airborne frequency domain electromagnetic system, and presents the attitude noise correction method based on coefficient rotation matrix and Kalman algorithm. A high‐performance attitude sensor based on (Micro‐Electro‐Mechanical System (MEMS) technology is used to design an attitude measurement system for the semi‐airborne frequency domain electromagnetic system. The calculated result shows that the required accuracy of the roll angle and pitch angle of the attitude measurement system is less than 0.1°, whereas the required accuracy of the yaw angle is lower. In the field application, the apparent resistivity results show that the imaging profile corrected by attitude error is more consistent with local geological data than that without correction. Consequently, the attitude measurement system and correction method proposed in this paper can improve the detection accuracy of the semi‐airborne frequency domain electromagnetic system significantly. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Contribution to the authorship, including that for case reports, should be appropriately evaluated. I have noticed a scarcity of case reports with clinic doctors listed as coauthors, prompting this investigation. I sought to offer suggestions on the possible reasons for this trend. Methods: I checked case reports published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Research, the Journal of Medical Case Reports, and the BMJ Case Reports. I identified case reports listing a clinic doctor as a coauthor. I consulted eight professors at Jichi Medical University to ascertain whether case reports from their departments included clinic doctors as coauthors and, if not, the reasons. Results: Among 65 case reports from Japanese institutes published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Research, only one paper lists a clinic doctor as a coauthor. Of 100 and 50 papers published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports and BMJ Case Reports, respectively, none listed a clinic doctor as a coauthor. Six out of eight professors admitted to never considering the idea of including clinic doctors as coauthors. Conclusions: The scarcity of case reports with clinic doctors as coauthors extends beyond Japanese obstetrics and gynecology, encompassing various specialties worldwide. Center doctors do not think of the idea that a clinic doctor should be a coauthor. A clinic doctor who transferred the patient should be considered as a candidate coauthor depending on his/her scientific contribution. Such an approach could foster an environment encouraging doctors to contribute to academic writing, regardless of their workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The XY model is a simplified insulation model for transformers that aims to connect the frequency spectrum of major insulation, insulation paper, and oil. It enables the calculation of the paper's frequency spectrum, facilitating a quantitative evaluation of the transformer's insulation status. Given the scarcity of research addressing the accuracy of the XY model and its corresponding equivalent circuit, this paper investigates the accuracy of the XY model and conducts an in‐depth analysis of the error associated with its equivalent circuit. Firstly, the frequency spectrum of oil‐paper insulations based on the XY model with varying moisture content and structure configurations were measured, followed by the simulation of both the corresponding 2D‐coaxial and XY models. By comparing the results obtained from these simulations with experimental data on oil‐paper insulation, the accuracy of XY model is verified. Subsequently, two variants of the equivalent circuit of the XY model are derived by combining the oil, spacer, and paper differently, which denoted as Type I and II circuits. Finally, we analyzed and explained the errors present in these equivalent circuits compared with the XY model. Our findings show that the width‐thickness ratio of oil‐paper insulation is the most critical influencing factor, while moisture content and insulation structure have a less decisive impact. Notably, for general transformers, as the width‐thickness ratio is between 30 and 70, the relative error of the Type I circuit remains consistently below 0.3% across different frequencies. Consequently, the Type I circuit proves to be a more suitable representation of the equivalent circuit for the XY model in the context of general transformers. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual SLAM algorithms can obtain a large amount of texture information from the environment and usually perform very well in static scenes, but there are a large number of irregular dynamic points when running in dynamic scenes, which can lead to increased error in SLAM feature point matching and loss of tracking localization. To address this challenge this paper proposes a SLAM system (YVG‐SLAM) that adapts to dynamic scenes. YVG‐SLAM is an improvement on the ORB‐SLAM3 algorithm, integrating the view geometry algorithm and the current powerful YOLOv5 algorithm, while proposing a dynamic feature removal strategy without a priori assumptions to reduce the influence of dynamic targets. In this paper, we first lighten the YOLOv5 algorithm, then process the image frame to get the bounding box, then use the view geometry algorithm to determine the dynamic feature points on the image frame, and finally remove the moving objects in the image frame according to the dynamic feature recognition strategy proposed in this paper. The performance of the algorithm is tested on the TUM RGB‐D and BONN RGB‐D datasets. The experimental results show that the robustness of the proposed algorithm on most video sequences is better than the existing SLAM algorithms dealing with dynamic scenes such as Detect‐SLAM and DynaSLAM, and the RMSE index of the absolute trajectory error measured on high‐speed dynamic video sequences can be significantly reduced by more than 93% compared to ORB‐SLAM3. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess vespicochory in Aristolochia (Aristolochiaceae), we conducted preliminary observations of Aristolochia shimadae under cultivation and in its natural habitat. Two paper wasp species (Polistes spp.) were observed visiting freshly dehisced capsules of cultivated plants of A. shimadae. After removing the seed from the capsule and licking the juicy and sticky substance surrounding it, paper wasps bit off and carried away only a part of the raphe. This behavior suggests that the capsule, including the substance surrounding the seeds, is attractive to them, and the raphe is equivalent to an elaiosome. In our field observations of A. shimadae in a natural habitat, a wasp (Vespula shidai) carried away a seed after licking the juicy and sticky substance surrounding it. This observation of vespicochory is the first report on A. shimadae and the first on angiosperms in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research activities would be better served if they were communicated in a manner that is openly accessible to the public and all researchers. The research we share is often limited to representative data included in research papers—science would be much more efficient if all reproducible research data were shared alongside detailed methods and protocols, in the paradigm called Open Science. On the other hand, one primary function of research journals is to select manuscripts of good quality, verify the authenticity of the data and its impact, and deliver to the appropriate audience for critical evaluation and verification. In the current paradigm, where publication in a subset of journals is intimately linked to research evaluation, a hypercompetitive "market" has emerged where authors compete to access a limited number of top‐tier journals, leading to high rejection rates. Competition among publishers and scientific journals for market dominance resulted in an increase in both the number of journals and the cost of publishing and accessing scientific papers. Here we summarize the current problems and potential solutions from the development of AI technology discussed in the seminar at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses optimization problems subject to an objective function's evaluation‐number constraint arbitrarily given in advance. These problems are practical for black‐box objective functions which cost much money and/or time per evaluation because money and/or time constraints are typically applicable in real‐world projects. This paper suggests a new solution strategy that can be used to adapt metaheuristics to evaluation‐number constraints arbitrarily given in advance. The proposed strategy updates the setting parameters of a target metaheuristic algorithm for every generation by solving a fixed small‐size optimization problem related to the evaluation‐number constraint. It has the advantage of being insensitive to the effects of dimensionality increases in principle. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is confirmed by numerical experiments with two well‐known metaheuristics, i.e., the particle swarm optimization algorithm and the differential evolution algorithm. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the compact and complex internal structure of 110 kV three‐phase enclosed GIS disconnector, the voltage distribution between the contact breaks of each phase has an influence on the insulation performance of the GIS disconnector, and its internal insulation design is a difficult point to be solved. To solve this problem, this paper firstly establishes a three‐dimensional model of three‐phase enclosed GIS disconnecting switch and conducts a research on the distribution of electric field under a specific working condition, it is found that the outer corner of the static contact, the inner corner of the static arc contact, the inner corner of the outer end of the moving contact and the inner corner of the moving contact are the internal electric field concentration of the three‐phase enclosed GIS disconnector. Then, in order to further reduce the electric field strength and improve the insulation margin and performance, this paper proposes a method based on the combination of Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and Multi‐objective Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (MOGOA) to optimize the structural design of three‐phase enclosed GIS disconnector, and a ELM model is established, which takes the internal fillet radius of stationary arcing contact, the internal fillet radius of moving contact, the internal fillet radius of external end of dynamic and static contact, the radius of the outer corner of the two static side contacts and the opening distance of the grounding contact as the inputs, and takes the maximum electric field strength of the two static side contacts and the moving side contacts as outputs; Finally, the structural parameters are optimized by MOGOA algorithm. Compared to the pre‐optimization period, the electric field strengths of the bus bar static‐side contact, dynamic contact and static side contact of the B‐phase after optimization decreased from 20.2, 9.28 and 17.5 to 11.4, 6.65 and 11.5 kV/mm, respectively. The electric field strengths of the dynamic and static side contacts are significantly reduced, which is beneficial for improving the insulation performance of the three‐phase enclosed GIS disconnector. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the pulse width modulation (PWM) harmonic suppression effect of the three‐phase VSI‐fed PMSM system, this paper proposed a novel random switching period (RSP)‐Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) technique for the three‐phase power converter. First, the proposed technique replaces the 10‐bit linear feedback shift register pseudorandom number generator (LFSR‐PRNG) with a Tiny Mersenne Twister (MT)‐PRNG to quickly generate high‐quality pseudorandom number sequences. Then, to reduce the sampling error caused by the current ripple, this paper analyzes the sampling timing under different modulation techniques. Based on the interrupted update mechanism of the Infineon AURIX‐TC264, the variable frequency sampling of the RSP‐SVPWM technique is implemented to ensure the best sampling of the motor phase current. Finally, the simulation and experimental results show that the proposed technique can effectively disperse PWM harmonic energy. Meanwhile, the RSP‐SVPWM technique based on variable sampling frequency effectively improves the phase current quality of the PMSM system. The proposed technique shows great potential for suppressing PWM harmonics in integrated PMSM systems. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To clarify whether the Whitney Comorbidity Index (WCI) is useful in Asian adults with cerebral palsy (CP) and whether aspiration pneumonia and pressure ulcers improved the prognostic significance of the WCI. Method: This cohort study evaluated individuals aged at least 18 years with CP in Japan. We used Cox proportional hazards regression to analyse 2‐year mortality rates. The predictive performance of the Charlson Comorbidity Index, Elixhauser Comorbidity Index, and WCI were compared as comorbidity assessment criteria. Aspiration pneumonia and pressure ulcers were added to the Cox models, and their impact on hazard ratios was determined. Results: Of the 2232 adults with CP, 72 died during the 2 years. The model with a previously reported weighted WCI with aspiration pneumonia and pressure ulcers produced the best fit. Additionally, the hazard risk of 2‐year mortality for an unweighted WCI score of at least 4 was 2.56; when CP‐specific comorbidities were added, it increased to 8.94. Interpretation: This study showed that the WCI can be used in Asian adults with CP. Furthermore, assessing patient age, aspiration pneumonia, and pressure ulcers in addition to the WCI increased the predictive value for mortality. Our findings indicate that the WCI can promote valid comparisons between international populations. What this paper adds: The Whitney Comorbidity Index (WCI) is useful among adults with cerebral palsy, irrespective of ethnic differences.Assessment of aspiration pneumonia and pressure ulcers increased the WCI predictive value.The WCI helps identify adults with cerebral palsy at risk of adverse outcomes. What this paper adds: The Whitney Comorbidity Index (WCI) is useful among adults with cerebral palsy, irrespective of ethnic differences.Assessment of aspiration pneumonia and pressure ulcers increased the WCI predictive value.The WCI helps identify adults with cerebral palsy at risk of adverse outcomes. This article's abstract has been translated into Japanese. Follow the links from the abstract to view the translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political apologies have been argued to contribute to reconciliation among groups and nations but their efficacy has also been questioned. This paper examines the acceptance of political apologies, their content and the protagonists in the victim nation, the perpetrator nation and their subgroups. Guided by studies on the structure of apologies, it distinguishes 10 features of apologies, seven of which concern their content and three of their protagonists. Following the analysis of apology statements by Japan to South Korea, the paper further breaks these features (factors) down into 32 elements (levels). The acceptance of around 70,000 possible apology combinations is examined in a randomized conjoint experiment, which was embedded in online quota‐based surveys in Japan (n = 2700) and South Korea (n = 3000). The analysis reveals that the content of apologies matters, protagonists matter more than content and some subgroups matter more than protagonists. The subgroup analysis showed that some within‐country differences are larger than cross‐country differences, which challenges the SIT. Apology statements that would be acceptable in both nations are summarised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that one of the variables that may influence perceived inequality in everyday life is cultural differences in relational mobility. We examined this research question across two cross‐cultural studies in Japan (Study 1, N = 196; Study 2, N = 214) and Spain (Study 1, N = 199; Study 2, 199), two countries that differ in their relational mobility levels. In Study 1, we contrasted two competing hypotheses: On the one hand, it could be predicted that individuals in countries with high relational mobility perceive greater inequality due to increased exposure to diverse social networks. On the other hand, it is also plausible that in contexts of high relational mobility, people perceive less inequality as they selectively choose to interact with individuals who share similar social backgrounds. Results supported the former hypotheses and showed that people in a country high in relational mobility (i.e. Spain) tend to perceive more economic inequality (vs. Japan, a country low in relational mobility). Moreover, we found an indirect effect of this cross‐cultural difference through the cultural affordances for meeting new people (i.e. one of the dimensions of relational mobility). In Study 2, we preregistered and replicated these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the simplest type of multi‐phase induction motor, the five‐phase induction motor is suitable for applications that require high power and reliability due to its advantages such as low noise, low torque ripple, and strong load capacity. To address the problem that the speed encoder is easily affected by external environmental interference, a speed sensorless vector control strategy combining linear active disturbance rejection control and adaptive full‐order observer is proposed. Compared with the traditional speed sensorless vector control strategy, this paper's proposed method designs three first‐order linear active disturbance rejection controllers instead of traditional proportional‐integral controllers for speed control. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy exhibits stronger anti‐interference ability under load disturbance, improving the overall robustness of the speed sensorless control system. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes normalizing flow‐based image super‐resolution techniques using attention modules. In the proposed method, the features of the low‐resolution images are extracted using a Swin Transformer. Furthermore, multi‐head attention in the flow layers makes effective use of the feature maps. This architecture enables the efficient injection of low‐resolution image features extracted by the transformer into the flow layer. Experimental results at x4 magnifications showed that the proposed method achieved state‐of‐the‐art performance for quantitative metrics and visual quality among single‐loss architectures. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequential recommendation frames the recommendation task as a next‐item prediction problem, where the model is trained to predict the next item given a user behavior sequence. While recent research has made significant progress in developing advanced models for this task, there exists a notable gap in the exploration of subsequences and the predictability inherent in user behavior sequences. This oversight can lead models to recall inconsequential sequential patterns, adversely affecting recommendation quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to augmenting sequential recommendation by integrating predictability awareness into subsequence modeling. Our method begins by discerning the predictability of target items; those easily predicted often align with the preceding subsequence, while those that are hard to predict typically indicate transitions to other subsequences. Leveraging this predictability information, we enhance the discovery of meaningful subsequences within individual user behavior sequences. Evaluation of four benchmark data sets using various state‐of‐the‐art sequential models illustrates the efficacy of our approach in enhancing recommendation performance. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrical workers must wear insulating gloves during daily maintenance. Detecting the condition of these gloves is significant for power safety. Due to the limitations of existing detection algorithms in accuracy and lightweight on power construction sites, this paper proposes a Faster‐YOLOv8 algorithm to detect the wearing condition of insulating gloves. First, it replaces the Bottleneck in the C2f module with the Faster Block and introduces a new C2Faster module. This reduces model parameters while improving performance. Second, the feature pyramid is improved to enhance the combination of deep and shallow semantic information. This improvement aims to improve the network's focus on detecting small targets. Finally, the GSConv is introduced into the neck network to reduce the model parameters and calculation. Additionally, GSConv enhances feature information exchange through shuffle operation. The effectiveness of the Faster‐YOLOv8 algorithm is verified through comparisons with mainstream algorithms such as the Faster‐RCNN algorithm, SSD algorithm, YOLOv5 algorithm, and YOLOv7‐tiny algorithm. The results demonstrate that the Faster‐YOLOv8 algorithm outperforms the above algorithms in terms of detection accuracy. Compared with the original YOLOv8 network model, the mAP is improved by 3.8%, the mAP of the wrong glove increased by 9.8%, the model size is reduced by 33.3%, and the detection speed can reach 81 FPS. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing distributed PV installation rate in distribution systems, voltage regulation difficulties such as local voltage violations and fluctuations have become common. To solve the voltage regulation problems, the local voltage regulation method using volt‐var (VV) function is effective for its high regulation speed, high accuracy, and flexibility. However, there are still hurdles on real application, such as parameter setting difficulties, insufficient voltage fluctuation mitigation effect, and unfairness of reactive power generation between PV customers. To further improve the VV function, this paper proposes a PID closed‐loop based VV function and mode‐switching function of PV smart inverter (SI). To validate the proposed methods, numerical simulations were conducted using a 6‐feeder distribution system model based on the JST‐CREST 126 distribution feeder model. According to the simulation result, the proposed method can better mitigate the local voltage violation compared to basic VV function based on the VV curve, also improve the fairness between PV customers, while the total reactive power generation and tap operations increases for the aim of more adequate voltage regulation. © 2024 The Authors. IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering published by Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community integrated energy system coupled with renewable energy generation provides an effective solution to improve economy and reduce carbon emissions. This paper establishes a two‐stage multi‐objective optimal scheduling model for community integrated energy system. During the day‐ahead scheduling stage, a comprehensive customer dissatisfaction model based on Kano model is established, and the model takes total operating cost, comprehensive customer dissatisfaction, and carbon emissions as multi‐objectives. The Non‐dominate Sorting Genetic Algorithmic‐II (NSGA‐II) and the CRITIC‐TOPSIS evaluation model are used to develop a day‐ahead scheduling scheme. On the premise of ensuring customer dissatisfaction, the intra‐day scheduling stage evens out the uncertainty of wind power and photovoltaic power through rolling optimization and improves the reliability of system operation. Simulation results show that the proposed model reduces the total operating cost and carbon emissions by 8.1% and 12.8%, respectively, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed model. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flexible interconnection system (FIS) in distribution transformer areas can improve the local consumption capacity of high penetration rate distributed photovoltaics and solve the problem of the high loading rate of distribution transformers. This paper presents an optimized grid‐forming control strategy for the FIS in distribution transformer areas. First, the DC side impedance small signal model of the FIS is built, and the reason for the stability difference of the FIS is analyzed when the active power flows in different directions. An optimized control structure is then presented based on the conventional grid‐forming control strategy. The theoretical analysis shows that the optimized grid‐forming control strategy can improve the stability of the FIS. Finally, the controller hardware‐in‐the‐loop experiments based on RT‐LAB confirm the effectiveness of the presented optimized control strategy. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand for use of indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras to prevent crime, analyze customer behavior in commercial facilities and other purposes has been increasing. For these types of applications, it is important to be able to estimate information that cannot be observed directly from the images, using the image data. One such type of information is the height of people appearing in the video. People's heights can be used, for example, to help identify a suspect in a crime investigation or as an attribute to understand customers better for marketing. However, many conventional technologies for estimating height from images have required special calibration, or the acquisition of other information in addition to the video. This paper proposes a method for estimating a person's height using only an image, without the need for any special calibration. The key points of the proposed method involve the following two processes. In the first process, a reference object of known size and the person are recognized and the person's height is estimated based on the relative sizes of the person and reference object in the image. The second process involves selecting frames from the video that are appropriate for use in the estimation process. In practical experiments using real video, the method was able to estimate people's heights with an average estimation error of 1.9%. © 2024 The Authors. IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering published by Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene text detection has been widely studied on haze‐free images with reliable ground truth annotation. However, detecting scene text in inclement weather conditions remains a major challenge due to the severe domain distribution mismatch problem. This paper introduces a domain adaptation curriculum learning method to address this problem. The scene text detector is self‐trained in an easy‐to‐hard manner using the pseudo‐labels predicted from foggy images. Thus, our method reduces the pseudo‐labeling noise level. Then, a feature alignment module is introduced to help the network learn domain‐invariant features by training a domain classifier. Experimental results show that our method improved significantly on both synthetic foggy data sets and natural foggy data sets, outperforming many state‐of‐the‐art scene text detectors. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In monitoring transmission line external damage prevention, due to the limited memory computing power of the equipment, the image needs to be transmitted to the data center at regular intervals, resulting in a high false negative rate. Therefore, this paper proposes a target detection method based on lightweight YOLOv5s. First, DSConv and improved E‐ELAN are used in Backbone to reduce the model's parameters. Then, GSConv and VoV‐GSCSP are introduced in Neck to reduce the complexity of the model. Finally, the Mish activation function achieves more effective feature transfer. According to the experimental findings, the proposed model's parameters are about 37% smaller than the original model's, and the calculation amount is about 53% smaller. The detection accuracy on the self‐built data set is the same, which proves that the proposed algorithm can reduce the model while maintaining high detection performance. It has specific practical significance for the terminal real‐time detection of external mechanical damage targets. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel consequent‐pole dual‐stator linear permanent magnet vernier machine (DS‐LPMVM) with PM in the mover slot opening, which has a bi‐directional flux modulation effect. The novelty of the proposed machine consists of consequent‐pole double‐sided topology with toroidal windings placed in the mover slot, as well as PMs both on the stator and mover slot to improve the air gap magnetic field. The dual‐stator adopts misalignment structure to suppress detent force and produce steady thrust. The electromagnetic parameters of the proposed DS‐LPMVM are evaluated and quantitatively compared with the conventional linear permanent magnet vernier machine (C‐LPMVM) in terms of air‐gap flux density, no‐load back EMF, inductance, and thrust. The geometrical parameters are designed to reduce the detent force. By analyzing the optimized structure parameters of the two machines, the good electromagnetic performances of the proposed machine are verified by the finite element method (FEM) and semi‐analytical method, and both results of the two methods are basically the same. It is found that the amount of PMs for the proposed machine is reduced by 20% compared to the C‐LPMVM, but the average thrust is increased by 20.7% and the thrust ripple is reduced to 4.04%. The results show that the proposed DS‐LPMVM has better flux modulation effect and thrust characteristics than C‐LPMCM. Finally, a 12‐slot, 10‐pole pairs prototype was manufactured and tested. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societal Impact Statement Summary The discovery of a new genus within the family Thismiaceae, known as fairy lanterns, marks a significant scientific milestone in Japan, a country renowned for its botanical research. The unearthing of a new genus, especially in a well‐documented flora like Japan, is both rare and monumental. Unlike other fairy lanterns that bloom under leaf litter and can be easily overlooked, the new genus and species, Relictithismia kimotsukiensis, often does not even emerge above the surface of the soil when flowering. This captivating characteristic not only enriches our knowledge of botanical diversity but also emphasizes the importance of preserving natural habitats that harbor such rare species.The family Thismiaceae, known as “fairy lanterns”, is distinguished by its urn‐ or bell‐shaped, glasswork‐like flowers with basally fused tepals and its dependence on specific fungi for carbon. A new genus and species, Relictithismia kimotsukiensis, has been discovered in southern Japan. This species is notable for its unique anther‐stigma contact, hitherto unreported in the other Thismiaceae. Unlike typical fairy lanterns that bloom just above the leaf litter, Relictithismia often flowers beneath it. The underground habit is potentially associated with self‐pollination. The discovery of Relictithismia enhances our understanding of evolutionary pathways within the Thismiaceae, as it possesses characteristics previously thought to be unique to Thismia (the annulus with drooping stamens) as well as traits found in other genera (free stamens without expanded connectives). This paper reviews the morphology, ecology, and evolutionary history of Relictithismia, offering insights into the peculiarities of these enigmatic plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wind turbine fault feature has strong uncertainty due to various factors such as wind speed and equipment parameters. Based on the analysis of the vibration characteristics of wind turbines with unknown prior conditions, this paper conducts research on the enhancement method of fault features. First, analyzing the change in fault features caused by the change in operating conditions to lay the foundation for subsequent research; Second, for the uncertainty of wind turbine fault feature frequency, searching for fault features by constructing the energy in each spectral interval, then use signal noise optimal resonance to transfer noise energy to low frequency fault features to achieve the purpose of adaptive optimal resonance enhancement of fault feature; Finally, validation of the proposed method by simulation experiments and fault signals of actual wind turbine rolling bearings. The case shows that the proposed algorithm can effectively realize the uncertain fault feature of wind turbines search and enhancement. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization problems widely exist in different real‐world applications. Ant lion optimizer (ALO) is an effective optimization algorithm that simulates the hunting behavior of antlions, but it will easily fall into local optima. To address this issue, this paper proposes a modified version of ALO called spatial ant lion optimizer (SALO). SALO makes full use of spatial informations of solutions to promote its searchability. It utilizes a distance‐based indicator instead of objective fitness to choose ant lions for updating solutions. Besides, it maintains a candidate enhanced archive by a distance‐based updating approach and implements a hybrid‐enhanced strategy in the archive to search for better solutions. Exhaust experiments are carried out through six classic benchmark functions and seven state‐of‐the‐art compared algorithms, and the results validate the superior performance of SALO. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current‐limiting fuse uses silica (SiO2)‐sand as arc quenching medium to increase a current‐limiting performance during the DC arc quenching process. In order to increase the current‐limiting performance of the fuse, a detailed understanding of an arc resistance rarc$$ {r}_{\mathrm{arc}} $$ rise process is necessary. This paper first carried out a 1000 A DC Cu arc quenching experiment using the silica‐sand to obtain transient change in rarc$$ {r}_{\mathrm{arc}} $$, morphology of the arc, and arc temperature T$$ T $$ during the arc quenching process. As a result, a current decaying increased rarc$$ {r}_{\mathrm{arc}} $$. The arc was maintained in the cavity surrounded by the fulgurite during the current decaying process. The temperature of Cu/SiO2 arc was 25–8 kK at a current region of 950–400 A during the arc quenching process. Second, we theoretically calculated an electrical resistivity ρ$$ \rho $$, and a thermal diffusivity α$$ \alpha $$ as vapor properties for the Cu/SiO2 vapor mixture. As typical results, the admixing of the SiO2 vapor into the Cu arc less increased ρ$$ \rho $$ of the Cu/SiO2 vapor mixture at T$$ T $$ between 25 and 5 kK. The ρ$$ \rho $$ of the Cu/SiO2 vapor mixture drastically increased due to only decay in T$$ T $$. In contrast, the admixing of the SiO2 vapor into the Cu arc significantly increased α$$ \alpha $$ at T$$ T $$ between 15 and 8 kK. The present results indicate that an increase in α$$ \alpha $$ and consequent rise in thermal energy dissipation from the arc is the main role of the silica‐sand vapor mixed with Cu arc in the DC fuse during the arc quenching process. The increased thermal energy dissipation due to the SiO2 vapor admixing further decreases T$$ T $$ to rapidly rise ρ$$ \rho $$ and rarc$$ {r}_{\mathrm{arc}} $$ during the arc quenching process. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CuCrZr alloy is widely used in vacuum circuit breaker contact materials and high‐speed railroad contact wires, etc. The study of the effect of different Cr and Zr contents on the performance of CuCrZr alloy is of great significance for the improvement of circuit breaker's breaking capacity, as well as the load and structural stability under harsh working conditions. In this paper, the mechanical properties, electronic density of states and thermodynamic properties of CuCrZr solid solution alloys randomly doped by different concentrations of Cr and Zr are comparatively analyzed using first‐principles calculations based on density functional theory. The results show that the alloys with different doping compositions have strong mechanical stability, electrical conductivity, and thermomechanical stability, and the reduction of the Cr/Zr doping concentration ratio can improve the toughness and ductility of the alloys, and the solid solution alloy with the composition of CuCr0.06Zr0.19 has the best machinability. The doping of Cr and Zr can improve the thermal stability of the alloy, Cr and Zr can be used as high‐temperature toughening elements for Cu. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Jesuit missionaries began arriving in Japan in the sixteenth century, they brought not only a new religion, Christianity, but also several domestic and exotic animals. Not only did these animals provoke feelings of curiosity and wonder, but they became a site of epistemic contestation between Christian and Buddhist views on human‐animal relations. In Buddhist thought, humans and animals were conceived of as interrelated, as both were thought to be trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. On the other hand, in Christian thought, humans and animals were stratified according to Aristotelian hierarchies, according to which the former were viewed as superior to the latter. After the Jesuits arrived in Japan, it soon became clear that their proselytes' pre‐existing modes of relating to and classifying the natural world would need to be converted to Aristotelian ones in order to propagate a Christian way of life. Thus, animals became a central part of Jesuit evangelism. Many of these creatures were deployed as tribute gifts, which altered the emotional landscape between the European and Japanese humans who used them as a buffer. This paper explores how animals, wonder, and religious epistemologies intersected to transform Japanese Christian attitudes towards animals during the Jesuit Mission to Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 36th International Mammalian Genome Conference (IMGC) was held in a hybrid format at the Tsukuba International Congress Center in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, for 4 days from March 28 to 31, 2023. This international conference on functional genomics of mouse, human, and other mammalian species attracted 246 participants in total, of which 129 were from outside Japan, including Europe, the United States and Asia, and 117 participants were from Japan. The conference included three technical workshops, keynote lectures by domestic researchers, commemorative lectures for the conference awards, 57 oral presentations, and 97 poster presentations. The event was a great success. Topics included the establishment and analysis of disease models using genetically engineered or spontaneous mutant mice, systems genetic analysis using mouse strains such as wild‐derived mice and recombinant inbred mouse strains, infectious diseases, immunology, and epigenetics. In addition, as a joint program, a two‐day RIKEN Symposium was held, and active discussions continued over the four‐day period. Also, there was a trainee symposium, in which young researchers were encouraged to participate, and excellent papers were selected as oral presentations in the main session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster research predominantly focuses on citizens, not on migrants. This tilted spotlight needs to be readjusted, since many advanced countries around the world have become immigration countries, and safeguarding the lives of migrants at times of disaster has become an important and immediate policy issue. Hence, this research concentrates on disaster management to protect the lives of migrants in a disaster‐prone and de facto immigration country. The particular country and event in question are Japan and the northern Osaka earthquake of June 2018. More than 100 migrants who lived near the earthquake's epicentre rushed to an evacuation shelter managed by the local municipal government of Minoh City, Osaka Prefecture. While non‐governmental organisations attract more attention, this paper centres on a local government and demonstrates the key role that it can play in both bridging and building networks across different communities, and thus in safeguarding the lives of migrants at times of disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) have recently shown promise as a cancer therapy. Although nsPEF‐induced apoptotic responses have been observed, the stress on individual cell components has not been quantified. Therefore, the authors built a cell equivalent circuit, including mitochondria, to quantitatively calculate the voltage, electric field, and electrical energy applied to the cell components in the frequency domain. Additionally, pulse width and electrical energy changed in mitochondrial membrane potential over time. The results indicated that the change of pulsed voltage switched the cell stimulation pathway, resulting in different mitochondrial membrane potentials over time. The frequency response analysis confirmed that the potential on mitochondrial membranes increased under shorter pulse width conditions. This suggested that the frequency analysis provided in this paper is useful for relating the site of cellular stimulation to induce physiological effects. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel asymmetric interior permanent magnet (AIPM) machine is proposed in this paper. The machine's rotor consists of asymmetric poles and auxiliary flux barriers. The torque ripple of the machine is weakened by the asymmetric design of the left and right sides of the magnetic poles. The magnetic‐field‐shifting (MFS) effect improves the electromagnetic torque after adding the auxiliary flux barrier to shift the magnetic axis. The influence of critical geometrical parameters on the electromagnetic performance of the machine is investigated under the condition that the stator and permanent magnet volume remain unchanged. The relevant geometrical parameters of the machine are optimized and designed through the improved Taguchi method. The performance of the AIPM machine and the conventional machine under no‐load and load conditions are further compared by simulation analysis with finite elements, verifying the increase in electromagnetic torque and the reduction in torque ripple. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YOLOv7 is one of the most effective algorithms for one‐stage detectors. However, when it is applied to pedestrian detection tasks in the industrial scene, it is still challenging for complex environments and multi‐scale changes of pedestrians. This paper proposes a new pedestrian detector for the industrial scene based on improved YOLOv7‐tiny and named as GP‐YOLO. First, the neck of YOLOv7‐tiny is replaced by RepGFPN structure, make full use of multi‐scale features to enhance the detection accuracy of objects with large‐scale changes. Second, a new gnconv branch is added to the feature fusion module, and the high‐order spatial interaction capability is introduced to further enhance the target detection accuracy. Finally, a lightweight method based on PModule is proposed, on this basis, a PConv bottleneck is designed to reduce the FLOPs and enhance the feature extraction. Experiments on a self‐made Industrial Pedestrian Data set show that before lightweight, the proposed algorithm achieves a 3.2% improvement in mAP@0.5:0.95 and a 3.7% improvement in Recall compared to the baseline YOLOv7‐tiny. After lightweight GP‐YOLO, compared to non‐lightweight, parameters and FLOPs are decreased by 26% and 23%, respectively, the mAP@0.5:0.95 is decreased by only 1.1% and the Recall is decreased by only 1.3%, which remains at a high level. Compared with baseline YOLOv7‐tiny, the lightweight GP‐YOLO has similar parameters and FLOPs, but the mAP@0.5:0.95 is increased by 2.1%, and the Recall is increased by 2.4%. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Switching power supply is widely used in industrial equipment, household appliances, and other fields due to the advantages of high integration and lightweight. Voltage sags can seriously affect the output voltage of switching power supply and the working condition of its power supply equipment; at the same time, the working scenarios of power equipment using switching power supply often have different level of harmonic problems. Considering the continuous innovation of switching power supply technology, the previous analysis and test results on the effect of voltage sags and harmonics on switching power supplies may no longer be applicable. The paper reveals the mechanism of the effect of harmonic alone as well as voltage sag superimposed harmonics on the output voltage of the switching power supply. Then the test research program was developed, and four different brands switching power supplies were selected for the test research, with which the effects of different amplitude voltage sags, harmonics with different frequencies and distortion, as well as voltage sag superimposed harmonics on the output voltage of switching power supplies were investigated. The results show that the tolerance ability of switching power supplies to voltage sags has been improved compared with previous switching power supplies, and the harmonic itself has less effect on the output voltage of switching power supply, but the joint action of harmonics and voltage sags will have a greater effect on the output voltage of switching power supply. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cirrhosis is a liver disease resulting from abnormal continuation of fibrosis, and ultrasound imaging is widely used for cirrhosis diagnosis because of its non‐invasiveness. However, due to unclear appearances of cirrhosis on ultrasound images, diagnoses are difficult and individual results possibly differ depending on the physician's experience. Recently, computer‐aided diagnostic systems using image processing and machine learning have been developed to help physicians detect cirrhosis as a 'Second opinion'. Some related studies have focused on a scenario where physicians set ROIs (Region of Interests) manually because selecting reliable ROIs for training a classifier and classification of patients is indispensable. But, the accuracy of such systems depends inherently on the quality of ROIs, and thus the workloads of physicians increase. In this paper, we propose a reliability evaluation method (REM) for each ROI based on its posterior probability and relationship to peripheral ROIs. The assumption of our proposal is that reliable regions of cirrhosis and normal can be observed in certain regions predominantly. We evaluated the effectiveness of the REM and its optimization for practical use. Experimental results showed that our proposed method curated reliable ROIs and improved classification performance in terms of AUC (Area Under the Curve). © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the challenge of ensuring robustness in vision‐based target recognition algorithms under adverse weather conditions, such as rain, snow, and fog, is crucial. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for road target detection that can effectively operate under various weather conditions. Our method is based on the cascade task framework of target detection, complemented by image restoration techniques. Specifically, we have developed a denoising network tailored to meet the demands of de‐raining and snow removal tasks. This network leverages prior knowledge about the mask, enhancing its effectiveness. In real‐world scenarios featuring fog, wet conditions, and snow‐covered roads, our proposed method demonstrates a significant improvement in both recall rate and accuracy compared to conventional single‐object detection algorithms. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modulated model predictive control (MMPC) method utilizes multiple voltage vectors in sequence within one switching cycle, achieving a fixed switching frequency. However, the control performance of using the MMPC technique still suffers from imprecise vector duration derivation and high computational burden. To address this, this paper proposes an improved MMPC technique aided by the Lagrange multiplier method to accurately calculate the duration of each vector, and then efficiently select the optimal voltage vector. Compared to the existing MMPC techniques, the proposed one exhibits a lower computational burden and superior steady‐state performance. Those benefits have been proven by the experimental results of a 1.5 k rpm permanent magnet synchronous motor drive. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High‐fidelity segmentation of blood vessels plays a pivotal role in numerous biomedical applications, such as injection assistance, cancer detection, various surgeries, and vein authentication. Near‐infrared (NIR) transillumination imaging is an effective and safe method to visualize the subcutaneous blood vessel network. However, such images are severely blurred because of the light scattering in body tissues. Inspired by the Vision Transformer model, this paper proposes a novel deep learning network known as transformer connection (TRC)‐Unet to capture global blurred and local clear correlations while using multi‐layer attention. Our method mainly consists of two blocks, thereby aiming to remap skip connection information flow and fuse different domain features. Specifically, the TRC extracts global blurred information from multiple layers and suppresses scattering to increase the clarity of vessel features. Transformer feature fusion eliminates the domain gap between the highly semantic feature maps of the convolutional neural network backbone and the adaptive self‐attention maps of TRCs. Benefiting from the long‐range dependencies of transformers, we achieved competitive results in relation to various competing methods on different data sets, including retinal vessel segmentation, simulated blur image segmentation, and real NIR blood vessel image segmentation. Moreover, our method remarkably improved the segmentation results of simulated blur image data sets and a real NIR vessel image data set. The quantitative results of ablation studies and visualizations are also reported to demonstrate the superiority of the TRC‐Unet design. © 2024 The Author(s). IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering published by Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that enables multiple data holders to collaborate on building machine learning models while preserving the privacy of their data. FL can be categorized as horizontal or vertical, depending on the distribution characteristics of the data. Specifically, horizontal FL uses data partitioned in the sample space, whereas vertical FL uses data partitioned in the feature space. Traditional vertical FL methods aim to facilitate collaboration among clients to infer a single global target. However, these methods may be impractical because each client often has a unique target to be inferred. In this paper, we propose a novel vertical FL method, called personalized vertical federated learning (pvFed), which addresses this limitation by allowing each client to perform inferences specific to their individual task. To the best of our knowledge, no existing method currently addresses this limitation. The objective of pvFed is to construct a global model that generates a representation vector to support client inference. The global model, constructed using distillation and dimensionality reduction, takes a sample ID common to all clients as input and outputs a sample‐specific representation vector. Clients utilize the intermediate representation of their own model and the representation vectors output by the global model for inference. Because these vectors are not dependent on client‐specific tasks, clients can repurpose them for any additional tasks. Our experiments, conducted on two distinct data types—image and tabular data sets, under a vertical partitioning where each client had its own specific task, demonstrated the efficacy of vectors generated by the global model in pvFed for client inference. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]