A neural paraphrase generator receives a sequence of tuples comprising a source sequence of words, each tuple comprising word data element and structured tag element representing a linguistic attribute about the word data element. An RNN encoder receives a sequence of vectors representing a source sequence of words, and RNN decoder predicts a probability of a target sequence of words representing a target output sentence based on a recurrent state in the decoder. An input composition component includes a word embedding matrix and a tag embedding matrix, and receives and transforms the input sequence of tuples into a sequence of vectors by 1) mapping word data elements to word embedding matrix to generate word vectors, 2) mapping structured tag elements to tag embedding matrix to generate tag vectors, and 3) concatenating word vectors and tag vectors. An output decomposition component outputs a target sequence of tuples representing predicted words and structured tag elements, the probability of each single tuple from the output is predicted based on a recurrent state of the decoder.

The variability of human languages poses a challenge to human-machine communication: different forms correspond to and may approximate the same meaning. For example, a question answering system capable of answering the question "The GDP of which country has risen steadily since 2012?" might fail in answering the question "Which country's GDP has continued to increase since 2012?" although to humans, these two are obviously similar. The fields of paraphrase mining (extracting of equivalent pairs from text) and paraphrase generation (generating paraphrase pairs based on rules or machine learning models) have tried to address this challenge.
Generating and identifying paraphrases is an important part of a large number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, due to the variability of language. Indeed, NLP systems must be able to handle this variability as users can express the same or similar concepts in a number of different ways. Inspired by the success of neural machine translation, there has been a number of studies investigating the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence models for paraphrase generation. The focus of these works has been the exploration of different neural network architectures, using multiple layers of recurrent cells, using residual connections between layers, and drop-out.
Many NLP tasks, including automatic question answering and summarization or text generation, can benefit from the recognition or generation of paraphrases. For example, we can answer "How hot is it in Singapore in fall?" if we can relate it to the question "What is the temperature in Singapore in autumn?" and the answer to the latter is known. In a dialogue system, generating paraphrases of the system utterances may lead to more natural interaction. Recently, neural machine translation techniques based on sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have been applied to the task of paraphrase generation with promising results.
Paraphrases are phrases or sentences that use different words or syntax to express the same or similar meaning (Rahul Bhagat and Eduard Hovy. 2013. What Is a Paraphrase? Computational Linguistics 39 (2013), 463-472. Issue 3.). Given the variability of language, generating paraphrases for an input phrase or sentence is an important part of a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. For example, if we can identify that a question submitted to a Question Answering (QA) system is a paraphrase of another question with known answer, then the QA system can answer the first question as well. In the context of automatic query expansion, paraphrases can be used as alternative query reformulations (Karen Spärck Jones and John I. Tait. 1984. Automatic Search Term Variant Generation. Journal of Documentation 40, 1 (1984), 50-66.). Madnani and Dorr provide an overview of data-driven paraphrase generation (Nitin Madnani and Bonnie J. Dorr. 2010. Generating Phrasal and Sentential Paraphrases: A Survey of Data-driven Methods. Comput. Linguist. 36, 3 (2010), 341-387.).
One approach to paraphrase generation is to consider it as a monolingual translation task, where an input phrase is translated to its paraphrases. (Chris Quirk, Chris Brockett, and William B. Dolan. 2004. Monolingual Machine Translation for Paraphrase Generation. In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '04). 142-149. Sander Wubben, Antal van den Bosch, and Emiel Krahmer. 2010. Paraphrase Generation As Monolingual Translation: Data and Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG '10). 203-207.) Since the recent advances in neural machine translation and sequence-to-sequence models (Dzmitry Bandanau, Kyung Hyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. 2015. Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc V. Le. 2014. Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS '14). 3104-3112.), there has been a number of works where neural machine translation models have been applied to the task of paraphrase generation (Sadid A. Hasan, Bo Liu, Joey Liu, Ashequl Qadir, Kathy Lee, Vivek Datla, Aaditya Prakash, and Oladimeji Farri. 2016. Neural Clinical Paraphrase Generation with Attention. In Proceedings of the Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop (ClinicalNLP). 42-53. Jonathan Mallinson, Rico Sennrich, and Mirella Lapata. 2017. Paraphrasing Revisited with Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers (EACL '17). 881-893. Aaditya Prakash, A. Hasan, Sadid, Kathy Lee, Vivek Datla, Ashequl Qadir, Joey Liu, and Oladimeji Farry. 2016. Neural Paraphrase Generation with Stacked Residual LSTM Networks. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers (COLING '16). 2923-2934.). However, a shortcoming of these works is they have focused on exploring alternative neural network configurations and have only employed the surface form of words, ignoring any syntactic information, such as Part-of-Speech (POS) tags.
Accordingly, one key problem associated with these approaches is that they have only relied on words, ignoring any syntactic information, such as Part-of-Speech (POS) tags, grammatical functions, or named entities. Existing models only incorporate word strings and ignore linguistic meta-data.
Mining and Generating Paraphrases. Lin and Pantel (Dekang Lin and Patrick Pantel. 2001. DIRT—Discovery of Inference Rules from Text. In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '01). 323-328.) described DIRT (Discovery of Inference Rules from Text), a method to mine paraphrase pairs, which they called inference rules, from text using a dependency representation. Sentences are parsed using Lin's rule-based Minipar parser, and the near meaning equivalence of two phrases is then established via a similarity comparison of their dependency paths and using mutual information. Lin and Pantel's work was the first theory-agnostic, large-scale attempt to extract paraphrase pairs.
Pasça and Dienes (Marius Paşca and Péter Dienes. 2005. Aligning Needles in a Haystack: Paraphrase Acquisition Across the Web. In Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP '05). 119-130.) presented a method for mining paraphrases from a Web crawl by aligning n-gram fragments bounded by shared anchor n-grams on either side. The method is notable for working with noisy input text, for not requiring a parallel corpus, and for relying only on a sentence splitter and a POS tagger. The length of the fixed anchors on either side determine the specificity of the extracted paraphrases. From a crawl of 972 m Web pages, depending on settings between 13.9 k and 41.7 m paraphrase pairs are extracted. The precision of paraphrases was not evaluated for a random sample in a component-based evaluation as one would expect; instead, the top-100, middle 100 and bottom 100 paraphrases of a run were evaluated. An additional task-based evaluation on date related questions from the TREC QA track showed 10-20 points of improvements in mean reciprocal rank of the correct answer.
The RTE (Recognizing Textual Entailment) shared task held seven times to date first as part of the PASCAL initiative and now as part of the Text Analysis Conference (TAC) has investigated the efficacy of the research question of entailment recognition based on short text fragments (Ido Dagan, Oren Glickman, and Bernardo Magnini. 2006. The PASCAL Recognising Textual Entailment Challenge. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Machine Learning Challenges: Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Visual Object Classification, and Recognizing Textual Entailment (MLCW '05). 177-190.). Entailment can be seen as a unidirectional version of the paraphrase relation. Zhao, Wang and Liue (Shiqi Zhao, HaifengWang, and Ting Liu. 2010. Paraphrasing with Search Engine Query Logs. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING '10). 1317-1325.) described one of the earliest attempts to mine paraphrases from search query logs. Biran, Blevins and McKeown mined templatized (i.e., slightly abstracted) sentential paraphrase sets with typed variable slots) from plain text. Madnani and Dorr (Nitin Madnani and Bonnie J. Dorr. 2010. Generating Phrasal and Sentential Paraphrases: A Survey of Data-driven Methods. Comput. Linguist. 36, 3 (2010), 341-387.). provided a survey of techniques for generating paraphrases from data. Androutsopoulos and Malakasiotis also survey methods for paraphrasing and textual entailment recognition, generation and extraction. More recently, Yin et al. modelled sentence pairs with an attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (AB-CNN). The three models are utilized in the tasks of Answer Selection (AS) in question answering, paraphrase identification (PI) and textual entailment (TE).
Paraphrasing as Machine Translation. In the context of machine translation, there have been attempts to extract paraphrase pairs from parallel corpora or other translation pairs. Quirk, Brockett and Dolan (Chris Quirk, Chris Brockett, and William B. Dolan. 2004. Monolingual Machine Translation for Paraphrase Generation. In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '04). 142-149.) investigated the use of statistical machine translation to generate new paraphrases for input sentences, based on a large number of aligned sentence pairs extracted from news articles on the Web. Bannard and Callison-Burch (Colin Bannard and Chris Callison-Burch. 2005. Paraphrasing with Bilingual Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '05). 597-604.) extracted paraphrases from a bilingual parallel corpus by treating paraphrases as pairs of phrases in one language that are aligned with the same phrase in the second language. In the context of Natural Language Generation (NLG), Wubben, Van Den Bosch and Krahmer generated sentential paraphrases using statistical machine translation trained on a corpus of news headlines and demonstrated improved performance compared to a word substitution method.
Encoder-Decoder Models. The introduction of encoder-decoder models to machine translation has led to important improvements in the quality of machine translation. The basic idea of encoder-decoder models is that the decoder, which corresponds to a neural language model, generates the output sequence starting from an initial state that corresponds to the hidden state of the encoder, which has processed the input sequence. Kalchbrenner and Blunsom (Nal Kalchbrenner and Phil Blunsom. 2013. Recurrent Continuous Translation Models. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '13). 1700-1709.) introduced a model where the encoder and the decoder were a convolutional neural network and a recurrent neural network, respectively. Sutskever, Vinyals and Le (Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc V. Le. 2014. Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS' 14). 3104-3112.) introduced the sequence-to-sequence model, which uses for both the encoder and decoder a recurrent neural network with LSTM units. They also found that reversing the input led to improved performance, possibly due to the close alignment between source and target languages in the machine translation task they evaluated the model on (translating French to English). As a result, the initial words in the input sequence can have a higher impact on the encoder's hidden state, which is then used to condition the decoder's generated sequence. Bandanau, Cho and Bengio (Dzmitry Bandanau, Kyung Hyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. 2015. Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).) used a bi-directional RNN to model the encoder, and introduce an attention mechanism, which generates one vector representation for each word in the input sequence, instead of encoding the whole input with just one vector. Luong, Pham and Manning refined the idea of attention by computing attention from a window of words, instead of using all of the input words, and concatenate the attention vectors with the hidden state vectors of the decoder before predicting the words of the output sequence. Neubig (Graham Neubig. 2017. Neural Machine Translation and Sequence-to-sequence Models: A Tutorial. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1703.01619 (2017). offered a recent and comprehensive overview of sequence-to-sequence models for machine translation.
Neural machine translation models have also been applied to the task of paraphrase generation. Hasan et al. (Sadid A. Hasan, Bo Liu, Joey Liu, Ashequl Qadir, Kathy Lee, Vivek Datla, Aaditya Prakash, and Oladimeji Farri. 2016. Neural Clinical Paraphrase Generation with Attention. In Proceedings of the Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop (ClinicalNLP). 42-53.) used a bi-directional RNN for encoding and a RNN for decoding paraphrases, with the attention mechanism by Bandanau, Cho and Bengio (Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). They also represented input and output as sequences of characters, instead of word sequences. Prakash et al. (Aaditya Prakash, A. Hasan, Sadid, Kathy Lee, Vivek Datla, Ashequl Qadir, Joey Liu, and Oladimeji Farry. 2016. Neural Paraphrase Generation with Stacked Residual LSTM Networks. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers (COLING '16). 2923-2934.). used a similar architecture with more layers and residual connections, where the input of one layer is also made available to the above layer. Mallinson, Sennrich and Lapata (Jonathan Mallinson, Rico Sennrich, and Mirella Lapata. 2017. Paraphrasing Revisited with Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers (EACL '17). 881-893.) applied the bilingual pivoting approach proposed by Bannard and Callison-Burch (Cohn Bannard and Chris Callison-Burch. 2005. Paraphrasing with Bilingual Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '05). 597-604.) with neural machine translation, where the input sequence is mapped to a number of translations in different languages, and then these translations are mapped back to the original language. One key shortcoming to all these approaches is that none of these works used additional linguistic information, such as POS tags to enhance the quality of generated paraphrases. An additional problem is the encoder-decoder models used randomly initialized embeddings.
What is needed is a system adapted to consider and synthesize syntactic information, such as linguistic or Part-of-Speech (POS) tags, grammatical functions, or named entities, in conjunction with neural network architectures to improve performance, especially in connection with paraphrase generation. A system is needed that will use pretrained values to populate one or more embedding matrix at initialization.


The present invention provides a new bearing device of free rolling parts. According to the basic embodiment the bearing device is comprised of: an inner race, an outer race, two rows of rolling parts wherein each rolling part is in not in a contact with two adjacent rolling parts in the same row and in contact with rolling parts of at least one adjacent row and/or with the surface of one of the races. The bearing structure is designed to create orbital eccentricity between the inner race and the outer race. When a load is applied on said bearing it is equally distributed over all rolling parts.

Methods of reducing kinetic friction are known in the prior art. According to these methods, rolling parts are placed between moving closed surfaces. The rolling parts can be fixed or free. These types of methods are implemented in translational or rotational engagements.
The present patent mainly relates to a rotational engagement, but can also be extended to a translational type of engagement.
Roller bearings, which substitute kinetic friction with static one are widely used in this technology, improving performance of devices and reducing power losses.
The roller bearings consist of concentric inner and outer races with tracks on their surfaces. The space between the races is filled with rolling parts. The rolling parts roll on the tracks of the surfaces minimizing the kinetic friction.
The roller bearing known in the prior art contains one orbital row of rolling parts and a separator that provides spatial separation between the rolling parts and determines the relative distance between them. The motion of the roller bearing is effected by not only contacts of the rolling parts with tracks, but also by their slipping contacts with the separator.
There are number of attempts known in the prior art to avoid the use of a separator in order to improve the functionality of the system of this type. This can be done by reducing or removing the slippage of the system's parts as well as distributing the radial and frictional loads over all of the rolling parts and contact surfaces of the race tracks.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,077 discloses a bearing with a second orbital row of rollers which encircles the first row in such a way that each roller of the outer row is in contact with the outer race track and two rollers of the inner row, and each roller of the inner row is in contact with the inner race track and two rollers of the outer row. One of the rollers is concave and consists of two conical parts. These two conical parts are connected by an adjustable screw for varying their axial mutual position. The said composite roller is inserted to the roller bearing at the last stage of its assemblage. The change in the relative distance between the two parts of the composite roller should enable the precise fitting of races, balls and parts to maintain slack-free engagement.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,326,759 discloses a bearing with a third row of rollers positioned between the first and the second row. Each roller of the second row is in contact with two rollers of adjacent inner and outer rows. Constant engagement should be achieved due to the precision of the bearing parts, which provides the retention of the engagement and lengths of orbital rows ensuring concentricity of the races.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,053,191 presents a method for producing rolling-contact-only bearings with rotating elements and rings. The rings acting as springs should ensure continuous separation between all rotating elements, thereby carrying the entire bearing load and permitting radial deflection under load to avoid slippage of the elements. The retention of the engagement should provide concentricity of the races.
Methods for using two tracks and several rows of rollers between them as a frictional reduction gear are also known in the prior art.
One of these methods is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,737,695. The author suggests the use of inner and outer races as well as several rows of rolling parts in the method described above with two modifications:                for the adjustment of mutual retention between the parts a pressure roller is mounted between two adjacent rollers. The pressure roller is in contact with other two rollers that belong to a row and it is not connected to the races. The radial displacement of the pressure roller results in a change of mutual position of the two friction rollers and consequently effects on orbit lengths of all rows and retention of the engagement.        to ensure the concentricity the races, they are engaged by two additional bearings.

Method for multi orbital engagement of surfaces by free rolling bodies and multi orbital devices based on this method

Abstract: Furthermore, the load applied on said bearing decrease the orbital eccentricity wherein minimum limit of orbital eccentricity is maintained through the working process. The device engagement of rolling parts is slack-free.


Apparatuses, methods, and systems for beamforming in antenna systems are disclosed. A method includes determining an unconstrained analog precoding matrix (FRF,UC), wherein the unconstrained analog precoding matrix (FRF,UC) is determined based on M dominant eigenvectors of the sum of spatial channel covariance matrices of K users, and wherein K indicates a number of users communicating with a base station. The method further includes determining a constrained analog precoding matrix (FRF) based on the unconstrained analog precoding matrix (FRF,UC), determining a compensation matrix (FCM), digitally multiplying K inputs with a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding matrix (FMU) generating M outputs, digitally multiplying the M outputs with the compensation matrix (FCM) generating M compensation outputs, generating M analog frequency-up-converted signals based on the M compensation outputs, and analog multiplying the M analog frequency-up-converted signals with the analog precoding matrix (FRF) generating N output signals for transmission, wherein N is greater than M.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is commonly considered a potential candidate for next generation wireless communication, whereby a base station equipped with many antennas simultaneously communicates with multiple users sharing time and frequency resources. In wireless systems, transmitted signals to a user may cause interference in other systems. Also, many antennas require many radio frequency (RF) chains, which increase power consumption.
It is desirable to have apparatuses, methods, and systems for beamforming in multiple antenna systems.


A device for connecting in rotation two substantially coaxial elements (10,12), of the type comprising a splined shaft (10,20), a splined hub (24) and clamping elements for achieving a relative axial immobilization between the splined shaft and splined hub. A first end portion of the splined shaft (20) is provided with a centering ring (30) having an outer surface (34) including an outer screw threading (36) having unsymmetrical flanks, which ring (30) is screw-threadedly mounted in a corresponding portion (42) of the splined hub (24) comprising a complementary tapping (44) having unsymmetrical flanks. The second end portion (46) of the splined shaft (20) comprises an outer screw threading (48) on which is screw-threadedly mounted an axial clamping nut (50) having a radial face (52) cooperating with a confronting radial face (54) on the splined hub (24). The invention is of utility in connecting in rotation a power shaft and a rotating element of a turbomachine.

The present invention relates to a device for connecting two substantially coaxial elements in rotation about a common axis.
The invention concerns a device of the type comprising a splined shaft and a splined hub for the two connected elements, and clamping means for achieving a relative axial immobilization of the two splined members.
The invention more particularly concerns a connecting device for ensuring the transmission of power and the geometric centering between two rotatable elements, such as for example a power shaft and a bladed wheel of a turbomachine.
Among splined connecting devices there are those whose splines have straight flanks and those whose splines have involute flanks. In the case of splines having involute flanks, the male and female splined elements are automatically centered relative to each other under the effect of the applied torque. In use, it is found that this type of arrangement is only suitable for shafts rotating at low speeds and is unsatisfactory for shafts having high speeds of rotation.

Device for connecting two elements in rotation


An apparatus for driving a wavelength-independent light source is provided. The apparatus includes a seed light signal generation unit configured to generate seed light signals with one or more wavelengths based on a wavelength identification signal, a wavelength light detection unit configured to detect the wavelength identification signal from the seed light signals, an extraction unit configured to extract wavelength information corresponding to the detected wavelength identification signal and extract a driving condition of a wavelength-independent light source corresponding to the extracted wavelength information, and a driving unit configured to drive the wavelength-independent light source according to the extracted driving condition.

1. Field
The following description relates to extracting the driving conditions for a wavelength-independent light source and driving the wavelength-independent light source according to the extracted driving conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the most important factors in implementing a wavelength division multiplexing-passive optical network (WDM-PON) is a method of operating a colorless light source, such as, for example, a reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA), a reflective electro absorption modulator integrated with SOA (REAM-SOA) or a Fabry-Perot laser diode (FP-LD), which usually exhibits wavelength-independent characteristics and needs externally-injected light for fixing the wavelength of the wavelength-independent light source. In this case, such wavelength-independent light sources may simply amplify and modulate injected light without any knowledge of wavelengths allocated thereto or the power of the injected light, and then may transmit the amplified-and-modulated light to the outside thereof. Thus, the transmission performances of the wavelength-independent light source may deteriorate for a specific driving condition.
Therefore, a careful technique is needed to improve the transmission performances of a wavelength-independent light source by identifying necessary information such as wavelengths allocated to the wavelength-independent light source or the power of injected light, and driving the wavelength-independent light source optimally based on the identified information.

Apparatus and method for driving wavelength-independent light source

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute


Provided herein include formulations for topical administration, such as ophthalmic formulations, and methods of using such formulations. In some aspects and embodiments the formulations may include a polyoxyl lipid or fatty acid, and or a polyalkoxylated alcohol and may include nanomicelles. Also include methods of treating or preventing diseases or conditions, such as ocular diseases or conditions.

The information provided herein and references cited are provided solely to assist the understanding of the reader, and does not constitute an admission that any of the references or information is prior art to the present invention.
United States Patent Application Nos US2010/0310462 and US2009/0092665 disclose drug delivery systems for ophthalmic use that have nanomicelles that include vitamin E TPGS.
Travoprost involves a formulation for glaucoma or ocular hypertension that includes HCO-40 and a prostaglandin analog as the active ingredient. See dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/lookup.cfm?setid=338e7ff4-0d91-4208-a45d-bfa2be52334d on the world-wide web. The active ingredient is present at 0.004%. The formulation includes propylene glycol and does not include nanomicelles. HCO-40 is present in Travoprost at 0.5%. See ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/EPAR_-_Product_information/human/000665/WC500038389.pdf on the world-wide web.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.


A system, method, and computer program product for providing information local to a called party located in a different geographic location is disclosed. In one embodiment, the computer implemented method includes the steps of receiving, at the communication device, a communication identifier; sending a request to a network device to determine a current location of a second communication device associated with the communication identifier; receiving location information identifying the current location of the communication device associated with the communication identifier; and presenting at least a portion of the information corresponding to the current location of the communication device associated with the communication identifier.

The world has become a global society. People no longer simply conduct business locally, regionally, or even nationally. Today, people routinely travel and conduct business internationally. It is not uncommon for businesspeople to call many different countries and time zones throughout the business day. Similar calling situations occur for individuals if calling friends or relatives who live overseas or in different parts of the country. Because calling around the world can become a regular event for people, people often lose track of time in the time zones to which they are calling. While global society has become more of a 24/7 operation, receiving telephone calls in the middle of the night are generally unwelcomed.
In addition to people not paying attention to time zones of called parties, people are generally unaware of holidays in countries around the world. Each country has certain national holidays that "excuse" businesses to shut down for those days. For example, in Brazil, Carnaval is considered a national holiday and most businesses are closed on that date. In the United States, most businesses are closed on Labor Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. Callers to Brazil and the United States are generally unaware of the particular days on which these holidays fall. Telephone calls to people in those and other countries on holidays are often surprised and confused when the calls are not answered.
A situation that is more difficult to track by callers about regions around the world are emergency situations that may affect individuals, businesses, and communication services. For example, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, thunderstorms, blizzards, and power outages may cause businesses and telecommunications to be affected. A caller to a friend or business in a region that is being affected by a natural or manmade emergency situation may not be able to reach the friend or business. Unless the caller can reach someone else in the region or access information about the region via the Internet or news source, the caller is unable to determine why he or she cannot reach the called party.

System, method, and computer program product for providing information associated with a remote geographic location of a called party


In an electronic component and a substrate module, a laminated body includes a first capacitor conductor and a second capacitor conductor embedded therein, which define a capacitor. First and second external electrodes are connected to the first capacitor conductor and the second capacitor conductor through extraction conductors, respectively. Third and fourth external electrodes are connected to the first capacitor conductor through extraction conductors. Fifth and sixth external electrodes are connected to the second capacitor conductor through extraction conductors. On a first side surface, no external electrode having an electrical potential different from the electrical potential of the third external electrode is provided between a first end surface and the third external electrode. On the first side surface, no external electrode having an electrical potential different from the electrical potential of the fifth external electrode is provided between a second end surface and the fifth external electrode.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic component and a substrate module, and more specifically, to an electronic component and a substrate module each of which includes a capacitor embedded therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, as an electronic component of the related art, a known multilayer capacitor is described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-140183. FIG. 18 is the front view of a multilayer capacitor 500 described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-140183.
The multilayer capacitor 500 includes a laminated body 502, internal conductors 504 and 506, extraction electrodes 508 and 510, and external electrodes 512 and 514. The laminated body 502 is configured by laminating a plurality of dielectric layers. In FIG. 18, a surface on the underside of the laminated body 502 is a mounting surface. The internal conductors 504 and 506 are laminated along with a dielectric layer, and face each other across the dielectric layer, thereby forming electrostatic capacity. The extraction electrodes 508 and 510 are connected to the internal conductors 504 and 506, respectively, and are extracted to the mounting surface. The external electrodes 512 and 514 are connected to the extraction electrodes 508 and 510, respectively. In the multilayer capacitor 500 described above, by maintaining a distance between the extraction electrodes 508 and 510 and a distance from the internal conductors 504 and 506 to the mounting surface in a predetermined relationship, a reduction of the equivalent series inductance is achieved.
However, in the multilayer capacitor 500 described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-140183, since the external electrodes 512 and 514 are adjacent to each other, the external electrode 512 and the external electrode 514 may be connected to each other by solder when the multilayer capacitor 500 is mounted on a circuit substrate. Namely, in the multilayer capacitor 500, a short circuit may occur.

Electronic component and substrate module including an embedded capacitor


A system, method and apparatus for wireless communications are provided. In an exemplary embodiment, frequency components present in a short duration modulated complex pulse is used to represent data to be sent. In other embodiments, the complex pulse is created, modulated, then modified to have desirable frequency characteristics. This Abstract is provided for the sole purpose of complying with the Abstract requirement rules that allow a reader to quickly ascertain the subject matter of the disclosure contained herein. This Abstract is submitted with the explicit understanding that it will not be used to interpret or to limit the scope or the meaning of the claims.

Wireless communications systems are delivering ever increasing content to consumers. In the field of wireless communications devices may be classified as licensed or unlicensed. This typically relates to the spectrum in which the device operates. Recently, there have been new types of communications technology that do not fit into the traditional regime. Some of these devices are capable of reusing frequencies that are typically licensed spectrum.
One example of these devices is a technology commonly referred to as Ultra-Wideband. This technology takes many forms but is characterized by very low power emissions across significantly large frequency bands. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has allowed these types of devices to intentionally transmit in frequencies typically licensed to other services. The transmission is significantly limited in power and therefore the devices do not pose significant interference risks to other incumbent users of the spectrum.
Recently, the FCC has allowed the reuse of frequencies normally assigned to television broadcasters. This reuse by unlicensed transmitters, is limited to specific geographical regions where television broadcasters are not present. Once again the transmissions are power and frequency band limited and pose no significant interference risk to incumbent users. In the U.S. the broadcast television spectrum is broken up into 6 MHz channels beginning around 50 MHz and extending up to 700-800 MHz. The spectrum is not continuous and other users, such as FM Radio, are within this spectrum with broadcast television.
In the design of wireless communications systems, design choices must be made as to the type of modulation used. Modulation, as is known in the art, is the process of encoding information on a signal that is to be transmitted. Typically, the transmitter modulates data onto the signal and transmits. A receiver then demodulates the data from the received signal. The choice of modulation impacts a number of communication parameters. For example, a selection of Binary Phase Shift Keying as a modulation technique can limit the transmission to one of two phases and therefore a single bit of information per signal. Other techniques may encode more information per signal and often modulation techniques can be classified by their ability to carry information in a constrained bandwidth. This "bandwidth efficiency" is often expressed in bits-per-Hertz. Another parameter that is impacted by the selection of a modulation technique is the spectrum the signal occupies. In many situations, present communication technologies, when operating in the television frequency bands, will be inefficient in their ability to carry large amounts of data.
Therefore there exists a need for a system, and methods for improved wireless communications.

Communication system, apparatus, and methods


Disclosed is a Talbot's interference type optical encoder constructed so as to minimize a measurement error due to a signal distortion. A semiconductor laser is installed so that a vertical transverse mode is set in a direction vertical to a moving direction of a diffraction grating serving as a scale. Further, a stop for regulating light beams from a light source is prepared. An aperture of this stop assumes such a configuration that a dimension in a direction along the moving direction of the scale diffraction grating is set equal to or shorter than a dimension in a direction vertical to the moving direction of the scale diffraction grating. Distortions of signals obtained are thereby reduced. A comparison level in signal processing can be centered on an amplitude of the signal, and, as a result, an occurrence of error can be prevented.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an encoder and, more particularly, to an optical encoder which uses the Talbot's interference principle.
2. Description of the Related Art
FIGS. 1A and 1B show principles of a conventional encoder based on the Talbot's interference principle. A light source generally designated at 1 in FIG. 1A consists of a semiconductor laser. A collimator lens 2 converts light beams emitted from the semiconductor laser 1 into plane waves which are incident on a diffraction grating 3 with a period P. Based on the Talbot's interference principle, the light beams diffracted by the diffraction grating 3 form interference fringes having the same period P as that of the diffraction grating at given intervals immediately after the diffraction grating 3. The interference fringes are shown in FIG. 1B. FIG. 1B illustrates sections D.sub.+1, D.sub.0, D.sub.-1 of +1st order, 0th order and -1st order respectively, diffracted light beams each traveling from the diffraction grating 3. The interference fringes are formed in a region indicated by W in FIG. 1B. An image of the interference fringes is called a Fourier image, and this phenomenon is termed a Talbot's effect. A spacing L between the diffraction grating 3 and a diffraction grating 4, having a distribution of transmittances with the same period as that of the diffraction grating 3, is set such that: L=N.multidot.p.sup.2 /.lambda., where .lambda. is the wavelength of the light source, P is the period of the diffraction grating, and N is a natural number. The diffraction grating 3 moves in a g-direction, whereby dark and bright output signals can be obtained via a photosensor 5 disposed behind the grating 4. Thus, pulse signals are generated by an unillustrated signal processing system. A g-directional displacement quantity of the diffraction grating 3 is detected by counting the pulse signals. The photosensor 5 may be in some cases replaced with two pieces of photodetectors A, B (see FIG. 3) to obtain 2-phase sine wave signals.
However, the following problems are inherent in the optical encoder which uses the Talbot's interference principle in the prior art. FIG. 2 shows the 2-phase signals obtained by the optical encoder described above and rectangular wave signals generated therefrom and assuming two phases A, B. A direction in which the semiconductor laser serving as a light source is installed, i.e., a vertical transverse mode of the beam emitted from the semiconductor laser, coincides with an x-direction (namely, the g-direction) in which the diffraction grating 3 moves. In this case, a waveform in an intensity distribution of the Fourier image formed identically with the grating 4 assumes, as illustrated in, e.g., FIG. 2, a more rounded shape on a dark-side m than on a bright-side M. When setting a comparator level (slice level) C for generating square waves taking HIGH and LOW levels at equal intervals from signals taking this configuration, it follows that a setting position is not centered in a signal amplitude but shifts to the dark-side m. Referring to, e.g., FIG. 2, when the comparator level is set at an amplitude center C.sub.O of the signal, a HIGH-to-LOW ratio, i.e., a duty, of the square wave becomes such that HIGH<LOW. A duty ratio cannot therefore be set to 1:1. Further, when employing 2-phase square waves, a HIGH-to-HIGH interval or a HIGH-to-LOW interval of these 2-phase signals is narrowed; or, in other words, a b or d interval is narrower than an a or c interval with respect to phase differences a, b, c, d between a HIGH and a LOW of the pulse. This is conducive to a defect wherein an allowance is lost in an attempt to perform multi-splitting of the signal, i.e., interpolation processing.
Moreover, if the comparator level setting position deviates from the center (comparator level C) of the signal amplitude, there exists a possibility in which the rectangular pulses may not be generated if the amplitude fluctuates due to this deviation and amplitude alternation. Namely, it may happen that the dark-side signal having a smaller amplitude with respect to the comparison level C does not exceed the comparator level because of the fluctuation in amplitude.
Such a distortion in waveform is produced due to the following causes. A Fourier image is produced due to an interference between the +1st order diffracted light and the 0th order diffracted light or between the -1st order diffracted light and the 0th order diffracted light. It is therefore necessary to increase a region to the greatest possible degree where the +1st or -1st order diffracted light is superposed on the 0th order diffracted light on the diffraction grating 4. Turning to FIG. 1B, however, a superposed region of sections D.sub.+1, D.sub.-1 of the .+-.1st order diffracted light beams is large. Formed in this region are fringes having an interval which is half as small as an interference fringe interval of the Fourier image. It follows that these fringes exert adverse influences, such as noise on a detection signal.
The following problems also arise. FIG. 3 is an explanatory view showing a layout of an optical system of the present apparatus. The collimator lens 2 is omitted in FIG. 3. According to the prior art apparatus, the auto power control (APC) oriented photodiode chip 6 is, as shown in FIG. 3, attached in the x-direction of the light source 1. An internal reflection light, or the like, traveling toward the surface of this chip 6 is reflected by this surface towards a z-direction. In this case, the light is mixed as a flare in the A-side of photosensor 5, with the result that unnecessary DC components are included in output signals (2-phase signals SA, SB) of the photo detectors A, B as shown in FIG. 4.


Provided is an apparatus and method for coding and decoding multi-object audio signals with various channels and providing backward compatibility with a conventional spatial audio coding (SAC) bitstream. The apparatus includes: an audio object coding unit for coding audio-object signals inputted to the coding apparatus based on a spatial cue and creating rendering information for the coded audio-object signals, where the rendering information provides a coding apparatus including spatial cue information for audio-object signals; channel information of the audio-object signals; and identification information of the audio-object signals, and used in coding and decoding of the audio signals.

According to a conventional audio coding/decoding technology, users should inactively listen to audio content. Thus, it is required to develop an apparatus and method for coding and decoding audio signals in multi-channels for a plurality of audio objects so that various audio objects can be consumed by controlling audio objects each of which having a different channel according to a user's need, and combining one audio content in various methods.
Conventional spatial audio coding (SAC) is a technology for representing, transmitting and recovering multi-channel audio signals as downmixed mono or stereo signals, and it can transmit multi-channel audio signal of a high-quality at a low bit rate.
However, since the conventional SAC is capable of coding and decoding signals in multi-channels only for one audio object, it cannot code/decode a multi-channel and multi-object audio signals, for example, audio signals for various objects in multi-channels, e.g., mono, stereo and 5.1 channels.
Also, conventional Binaural Cue Coding (BCC) technology can code/decode audio signals for multiple objects. However, since the channels of the audio objects are limited to a mono channel, multi-object audio signals with various channels including the mono channel may not be coded/decoded.
To sum up, since the conventional technologies can code/decode only multi-object audio signals with a single channel or a single-object audio signal with multi-channel, multi-object audio signals with various channels may not be coded/decoded. Therefore, users should inactively listen to audio contents according to the conventional audio coding/decoding technologies.
Accordingly, it is required to develop an apparatus and method for coding and decoding audio signals in various channels for each of multiple audio objects to consume various audio objects by controlling each audio object in mulitple channels, which are different according to a user's need, and combining one audio content according to various methods.
Also, an apparatus and method for converting multi-object audio bitstream into a conventional SAC bitstream and vice versa is required to provide backward compatibility between side information bitstream created in a multi-object audio coder and side information bitstream of a conventional SAC coder/decoder.
As described above, as the apparatus and method for coding and decoding the multi-object audio signal of various channels by individually control a plurality of audio objects with different channels and combining one audio content according to various methods, it is required to develop a multi-channel and the multi-object audio coding and decoding apparatus and method which can perform bitstream conversion to provide backward compatibility with the conventional SAC bitstream, and control each of the multiple audio objects having multi-channels to thereby combine one audio objects in diverse methods.

Apparatus and method for coding and decoding multi-object audio signal with various channel including information bitstream conversion


There are provided a landmark for recognizing a position of a mobile robot moving in an indoor space and an apparatus and method for recognizing the position of the mobile robot by using the landmark. The landmark includes a position recognition part formed of a mark in any position and at least two marks on an X axis and Y axis centered on the mark and further includes an area recognition part formed of a combination of a plurality of marks to distinguish an individual landmark from others. The apparatus may obtain an image of the landmark by an infrared camera, detect the marks forming the landmark, and detect precise position and area information of the mobile robot from the marks.

In general, to control an in-door robot moving indoors, it is required to recognize a position of the robot. Generally, there are two self-position calculation methods performed by a robot itself using a camera.
First, there is a method of using an artificial landmark. As shown in FIG. 1, a landmark 30 having a certain meaning is installed on a ceiling or a wall, the landmark 30 is photographed by a camera 20, the landmark 30 is extracted from an image, and coordinates on a screen are allowed to be identical with coordinates of a mobile robot 10, thereby calculating a self-position of the mobile robot 10 by itself (refer to Korean Patent No. 485696).
On the other hand, as shown in FIG. 2, the landmark 30 may be installed on a top of the mobile robot 10 and the camera 20 may be installed on the ceiling.
Second, there is a method of using a natural landmark. A ceiling is photographed by a camera, information of structures such as lightings installed on the ceiling and straight lines and edges of interfaces between the ceiling and walls is extracted, thereby calculating a self-position of a mobile robot by itself using the information (refer to Korean Patent No. 483566).
However, when using the artificial landmark, the artificial landmark may be affected by lightings and color information of the landmark may be distorted by sunlight. Also, when using the natural landmark, since the natural landmark is much affected by brightness of an ambient light and there is required odometer information or another robot position reader when recording a position of a feature of in the landmark, a large memory is required and an additional device is essential. Particularly, when there is no illumination, it is very difficult to use the natural landmark.
Accordingly, it is required a new self-position recognition method of a mobile robot, capable of being not affected by lightings and reducing a calculation of the image pre-processing.
Also, when using the two conventional methods described above, since coordinates of a camera and coordinates of a landmark attached to a ceiling calculate position information of a mobile robot while assuming that there is no rotation of in directions excluding the direction of gravity, the robot position information calculated using an image obtained by the camera may have many errors when the mobile robot goes over a small mound or is inclined by an external force or an inertial force of rapid acceleration or deceleration.
On the other hand, though there may be an initial correction for an inclination occurring when attaching one of a CMOS and CCD sensors used for a camera device to a robot, the initial correction is merely for an error occurring when initially installing but not for an error caused by an inclination occurring while the robot is actually driving.

Landmark for position determination of mobile robot and apparatus and method using it

Research Institute of Industrial Science & Technology


Provided is an aerodynamic drag reduction apparatus for reducing aerodynamic drag on an over-the-road vehicle while underway. The aerodynamic drag reduction system includes a frame assembly that is adapted to cooperate with a cargo-carrying portion of the over-the-road vehicle to couple the drag reduction apparatus to the over-the-road vehicle. First and second skirts are adapted to be supported beneath opposite lateral sides of the cargo-carrying portion of the over-the-road vehicle by arcuate rails. The first and second skirts are coupled to the frame assembly in a manner that allows thermal expansion and contraction of the first and second skirts relative to the frame assembly without warping of material forming an air-deflecting surface of the first and second skirts to an extent that would otherwise occur if the first and second skirts were fixedly connected to the frame assembly.

1. Field of the Invention
This application relates generally to the reduction of aerodynamic drag experienced by a vehicle and, more specifically, to a system for managing the flow of air about a portion of an over-the-road vehicle to reduce the aerodynamic drag experienced by such a vehicle while underway and improve fuel economy.
2. Description of Related Art
Over-the-road vehicles such as a semi-truck, box truck, intermodal freight vehicle, and other commercial vehicles typically include a tractor that tows a trailer or otherwise transports a cargo hauler. The tractor is a large vehicle engineered for towing power and durability. As such, conventional tractors typically have a large surface area on which drag forces act while the tractor is underway, causing the tractor to experience poor fuel economy, which contributes significantly to the cost of transporting freight from one location to another.
The fuel economy of the tractor further affected by aerodynamic drag is worsened when towing a trailer or otherwise transporting cargo. The rear wheels and suspension assembly of commercial vehicles, which can be located adjacent to a tail end of a trailer are often spaced far enough apart from the tractor that air can enter the space beneath the trailer from each side. This air contacts the rear wheels and suspension system and further contributes to the overall aerodynamic drag experienced by the vehicle.


An IC socket includes a socket body (1) having a plurality of passageways (10) extending obliquely from a mating surface (101) toward a mounting surface (103). At least two terminals (2) are insertable into each of the passageways. Thus, even if the at least two terminals are laterally and obliquely movable with respect to an end of the passageway upon the pressure of the IC package toward the IC socket, effective electrical connection between the IC package and the printed circuit board are also established through the use of the IC socket due to having every two terminals of one passageway employed for electrically mating with a common contact pad of the IC package or a common conductive element (31) of the printed circuit board.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an IC socket for electrically connecting an IC package with a printed circuit board.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional IC socket is shown in FIGS. 4-7 to include an insulative body 1′ with a passageway 10′ extending obliquely through the insulative body 1′, and a terminal 2′ insertable into the passageway 10′. The terminal 2′ includes a first contact arm 21′ and a second contact arm 23′ extending in parallel to each other. The first contact arm 21′ and the second contact arm 23′ are laterally and resiliently engagable with opposite side walls of the passageway 10′ by a spring package contact section 20′ formed therebetween. The spring package contact section 20′ is arranged to extend above a top surface 101′ of the passageway 10′ for electrically mating with a contact pad 41′ of an IC package 4′ (in FIG. 7). The first contact arm 21′ includes a board contact section 22′ formed at a free end thereof and arranged to extend below a bottom surface 103′ of the passageway 10′ for electrically engaging with a conductive element 31′ of a printed circuit board 3′ (in FIG. 7). Thus, through the use of the IC socket, electrical connection is established between the IC package and the printed circuit board. When the IC package 4′ is down-loaded onto the IC socket in order for electrical connection with the terminals 2′ of the IC socket, an oblique movement of the terminal 2′ with respect to a length axis of the passageway 10′ will result in a lateral shift of the package contact section 20′ or the board contact section 22′ with respect to an end of the passageway 10′. This action may cause the package contact section 20′ or the board contact section 22′ to be laterally offset from the corresponding contact pad 41′ of the IC package 4′, or conductive element 31′ of the printed circuit board 3′, thus resulting in electrical connection failure between the terminals 2′ of the IC socket and the contact pads 41′ of the IC package 4′, or the terminals 2′ of the IC socket and the conductive element 31′ of the printed circuit board 3′.


The present invention provides a method of privacy communication, in which an elliptic curve E and an element thereof are notified to all parties who wish to communicate, and data are transmitted from one party to another by using a calculation of the element and coded data made in secret by each party. The method is characterized by a construction of E(GF(p)) such whose number of elements has exactly p, assuming that p is a prime number and E(GF(p)) is a group of elements of GF(p) on the elliptic curve E. More particularly, E(GF(p)) is constructed by an algorithm: let d be a positive integer such that gives an imaginary quadratic field Q((-d.sup.1/2)) with a small class number; then find a prime number p such that 4.multidot.p-1=d.multidot.square number; and find a solution of a class polynomial H.sub.d (x)=0 modulo p such that is defined by d and given with a j-invariant.

(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a privacy communication technique to provide security for information transmission, and more particularly, to a privacy communication technique using elliptic curves.
(2) Description of Related Art
Privacy communication enables a sender to transmit information to an intended receiver alone without leakage to third parties, and a public key cryptosystem(PKC) is one of the methods thereof via a public digital communication network. In PKC, two keys--an enciphering key and a deciphering key--are given to each party; the former is open to the public while the latter is kept in secret. Given that it is relatively easy to manage these public keys, PKC has now become an essential technique when one wishes to communicate with more than one party in secret.
The security for PKC often depends on difficulty of a discrete logarithm problem(DLP) on finite abelian groups, and finite fields have been used as the finite abelian groups. However, owing to a toil of researchers, the time required to solve DLP has been reduced with every advancement they make. The history of such advancement is compiled in "Cryptography: A Prime", Alan G. Konheim, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Accordingly, a method that uses elliptic curves in place of the finite abelian groups was proposed to maintain the security for PKC against is advancement. This proposed method is described in "A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography", Neal Koblits, Springer-Verlag, 1987, and the DLP on elliptic curves(EDLP) reads:
Let q be a power of a prime number, GF(q) be a finite field, E(GF(g)) be a group of elements of GF(q) on an elliptic curve E, and an element P of E(GF(q)) be a base point, find an integer x such that Q=xP (Q is a given element of E(GF(q)), if such an integer x exists.
The researchers correspondingly began to apply this EDLP to the methods of the privacy communication such as PKC, because if effectively applied, it was envisaged that
1) the speed of communication would be sharply increased without impairing the security, for there had been no solution proposed such that could confer a sub-exponential algorithm on EDLP, PA1 2) the communication in volume would be reduced, PA1 3) a greater number of the finite abelian groups would be available compared with the finite fields. PA1 when m is 191, EQU #E.sub.3 (GF(2.sup.m))=2.sup.191 +1=3.multidot.p.sub.1, PA1 when m is 252, EQU #E.sub.3 (GF(2.sup.m))=2.sup.251 +1=3.multidot.238451.multidot.p.sub.2 PA1 Condition 1: PA1 Condition 2:
However, unlike the finite fields which define DLP, the researchers found it very difficult to construct appropriate elliptic curves which in effect define EDLP, and their interest has shifted to how easily one can construct them. Conventionally, the elliptic curves are constructed by the following method:
1) Method I
With this method, an elliptic curve called a supersingular elliptic curve is constructed. This method is described in "The Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems", Alfred Menezes, Scott Vanstone, Auscrypt 90, 1990, and following is the recapitulation thereof. This method consists of 2 steps as is shown in FIG. 1.
(i) Determination of a Prospective Elliptic Curve
Let E.sub.1, E.sub.2, and E.sub.3 be supersingular elliptic curves defined over GF(2) given by EQU E.sub.1 :y.sup.2 +y=x.sup.3 +x+1 EQU E.sub.2 :y.sup.2 +y=x.sup.3 +x EQU E.sub.3 :y.sup.2 +y=x.sup.3
Let E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m))(i=1-3) be a group consisting of the elements of GF(2.sup.m) on each supersingular elliptic curve, then EQU E.sub.1 (GF(2.sup.m))={x,y.epsilon.GF(2.sup.m).vertline.y.sup.2 +y=x.sup.3 +x+1}U{.infin.} EQU E.sub.2 (GF(2.sup.m))={x,y.epsilon.GF(2.sup.m).vertline.y.sup.2 +y=x.sup.3 +x}U{.infin.} EQU E.sub.3 (GF(2.sup.m))={x,y.epsilon.GF(2.sup.m).vertline.y.sup.2 +y=x.sup.3 }U{.infin.}
(.infin. is an infinite point which is known as a zero element).
As can be seen in the above, the elements of E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)) constitute a finite abelian group; for addition is applied among themselves.
Further, let m be an odd number, then the number of E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)(i=1-3), or #E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m), is found as given below by Deu's theorem and Hasse's theorem. ##EQU1## (ii) Determination of a Suitable Extension Degree m
It is known that EDLP is easily solved unless the order of the element P, or the base point, has a large prime factor. Therefore, a necessary and sufficient condition for the element P is that #E.sub.i (GF(2)) has a large prime factor. Thus, m such that satisfies the necessary and sufficient condition is found.
The elliptic curves found in Step (i) and m in Step (ii) are used to construct EDLP. Accordingly, #E.sub.3 (GF(2.sup.m)) factorized, and it is found that :
(p.sub.1 and p.sub.2 are prime numbers.)
This leads to a conclusion that EDLP can be constructed by finding a supersingular elliptic curve defined over E.sub.3 (GF(2.sup.191)) with the base point P whose order has exactly p.sub.1 or E.sub.3 (GF(2.sup.251) with the base point P whose order has exactly p.sup.2. In other words, the enciphering and deciphering keys are made by using these E.sup.3 (GF(2.sup.191)) and the base point P, or E.sup.3 (GF(2.sup.251) and the base point P.
In 1991, however, a solution using a reducing method was proposed. This method is effective in solving EDLP on supersingular elliptic curves, for it confers a sub-exponential algorithm thereon, thereby impairing security for privacy communication.
"Reducing Elliptic Curve Logarithm to Logarithms in a Finite Field", A. Menezes, S. Vanston, and T. Okamoto, STOC, '91, gives an explanation on the reducing method, and it reads:
Let q be a square of a prime number, E an elliptic curve defined over GF(q), E(GF(q)) be a group consisting of elements of GF(q) on the elliptic curve E. Then, EDLP on the elliptic curve having the base point P.epsilon.E(GF(q)) can be solved by reducing it to DLP over an extension field GF(q.sup.r) of GF(q), provided that the order of the base point P is prime to q. EDLP on supersingular elliptic curves, in particular, can be solved by reducing it to the sextic extension field of GF(q) -GF(q.sup.6)- at most.
Attacked by this reducing method, EDLP constructed by Method I can no longer secure PKC unless n of GF(2.sup.n) is increased to a number larger than 256, which in turn causes a steep decrease of the communication speed.
Given these circumstances, another constructing method of EDLP which can secure PKC against this attack was proposed.
2) Method II
With this method, ordinary elliptic curves which defines EDLP unsolvable by the reducing method is constructed. This method is described in "Non-supersingular Elliptic Curve for Public Key Cryptosystems", T. Beth, F. Schaefer, Eurocrypt 91, 1991, and the following is the recapitulation thereof. This method consists of 2 steps as is shown in FIG. 2.
(i) Determination of a Prospective Elliptic Curve
Let E.sub.i (i=4,5) be a non-supersingular, i.e. ordinary, elliptic curve defined over GF(2) given by EQU E.sub.4 :y.sup.2 +xy=x.sup.3 +x.sup.2 +1 EQU E.sub.5 :y.sup.2 +xy=x.sup.3 +1
Let E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)) be a group consisting of the elements of GF(2.sup.m)(i=4,5) on each elliptic curve, then the number thereof, or #E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)), is found as given below by Deu's theorem and Hasse's theorem. EQU #E.sub.4 (GF(2.sup.m))=1+2.sup.r -{(1+(-7).sup.1/2)/2}.sup.m -{(1-(-7).sup.1/2)/2}.sup.m EQU #E.sub.5 (GF(2.sup.m))=1+2.sup.r -{(-1+(-7).sup.1/2)/2}.sup.m -{(-1-(-7).sup.1/2)/2}.sup.m
(ii) Determination of an Extension Degree m
Let m be an extension degree for E.sub.i (i=4,5) such that it satisfies the two following conditions:
#E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)) must have a large prime factor. PA2 Let p be the largest prime factor of #E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)), and t be a sufficiently large positive integer, then 2.sup.mk -1 does not have p as a prime factor(k is an arbitrary positive integer smaller than t).
Condition 1 is given to provide #E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m)) with a large prime factor and Condition 2 to increase t as far as possible, for the security increases as t becomes larger; more particularly, when EDLP on the elliptic curve defined over E.sub.i (GF(2.sup.m) is reduced to DLP on the elliptic curve defined over the extension field of GF(2.sup.m), the extension degree m becomes larger than t.
The elliptic curves found in Step (i) and m in Step (ii) are used to construct EDLP. Accordingly, #E.sub.4 (GF(2.sup.m)) is factorized, and it is found that when m is 107, #E.sub.4 (GF(2.sup.m))=2.multidot.p.sub.3 (p.sub.3 is a prime number).
It is easy to calculate 2.sup.mk -1 with today's advanced computers, and to prove that 2.sup.mk -1 does not have p.sub.3 as a prime factor when k is a number from 1 to 6. Thus, it can be concluded that an ordinary elliptic curve defined over E.sub.4 (GF(2.sup.107) with the base point P whose order has exactly p.sub.3 must be found to construct EDLP, on which the security of PKC depends. In other words, the enciphering and deciphering keys are made by using these E.sub.4 (GF(2.sup.107)) and the base point P.
PKC using such ordinary elliptic curves is secure when n of GF(2.sup.n) is a number more than 100 with the level of today's computer technology. Yet, such security can not be guaranteed without increasing n endlessly to meet rapid progress in this field, which in turn reduces the speed of privacy communication. Therefore, a method of constructing elliptic curves such that define EDLP unsolvable by the reducing method has been sought after.

Method of privacy communication using elliptic curves

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.


A method of authenticating a user of a computing device is proposed, together with computing device on which the method is implemented. In the method a modified base image is overlaid with a modified overlay image on a display and at least one of the modified base image and modified overlay image is moved by the user. In addition to the moving, a change in orientation of at least one of the modified base image and the modified overlay image is required. Positive authentication is indicated in response to the base image reference point on the modified base image being aligned with the overlay image reference point on the modified overlay image after moving through at least one other pre-selected reference point.

Passwords may be used in many situations where a user needs to be authenticated. Situations requiring authentication may include the ability to access or use a computer, mobile phone, PDA, or any other device. They may also enable access to a physical location, or allow use of a credit/debit card or similar instrument. Passwords are typically alpha-numeric strings or sequences entered on a keyboard. Graphical authentication systems, where passwords are comprised of graphical components, also exist.
Like reference numerals are used in the drawings to denote like elements and features.

Multi-layer multi-point or pathway-based passwords


The disclosure relates to a time-of-flight camera comprising: a time-of-flight sensor having several time-of-flight pixels for determining a phase shift of emitted and captured light, distance values being determined in accordance with the detected phase shifts, characterised in that the time-of-flight camera has a memory in which parameters of a point spread function, which characterise the time-of-flight camera and the time-of-flight sensor, are stored; an evaluation unit which is designed to deploy a detected complex-valued image in Fourier space, in accordance with the stored point-spread function, and a complex-valued image corrected by diffused light is determined and the phase shifts or distance values are determined using the corrected complex-valued image.

This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
The time-of-flight camera or time-of-flight camera systems in particular relate to all time-of-flight or 3D TOF camera systems that derive time-of-flight information from the phase shift of emitted and received radiation. As time-of-flight or 3D TOF cameras in particular PMD cameras including photo mix detectors (PMD) are suited as described for example in DE 197 04 496 C2 and available from the company 'ifm electronic GmbH' or 'pmdtechnologies ag' as Frame Grabber 03D or as CamCube. The PMD camera allows in particular a flexible arrangement of the light source and the detector which can be arranged both in a housing and separately.


A shock-safe fuse holder for a cartridge fuse is provided which can be readily installed in a mating receptacle and removed therefrom for fuse replacement. The fuse holder includes a visual indicator for denoting a blown or missing fuse. The cartridge fuse is substantially enclosed within the holder to limit the access to the electrical contacts of the cartridge fuse to minimize the danger of electrical shock. The holder has a configuration for retaining the holder in a mating fuse receptacle even in the absence of an installed fuse.

Cartridge fuse holders are known in which a cartridge fuse is retained within a housing configured to permit the cartridge to be plugged into mating contact with a fuse receptacle and to be removed therefrom. Fuse holders of known construction are shown for example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,128,024, 4,094,212, 3,813,626 and 4,126,368.
In fuse holders of conventional construction the holder can in many instances not be retained in a fuse receptacle without a cartridge fuse being present in the holder. In addition, conventional fuse holders often do not include any means for verifying that a fuse is disposed in the holder or that the fuse is good without removal of the holder from the receptacle and inspection and/or testing of the fuse.

Shock safe fuse puller with blown fuse indicator and improved fuse retainer


A fuser unit includes: a cylindrical member having flexibility; a heat generator, which is arranged at the inside of the cylindrical member; a plate-shaped nip member, which is arranged to slidingly contact an inner peripheral surface of the cylindrical member and receives radiation heat from the heat generator; a backup member, which is configured to configure a nip part between the cylindrical member and the backup member with the cylindrical member, by nipping between the backup member and the nip member; a temperature detection unit, which is arranged to face an opposite surface that is opposite to the surface of the nip member slidingly contacting the cylindrical member at the inside of the cylindrical member and detects a temperature of the nip member, and an urging member that urges the temperature detection unit toward the nip member.

Regarding a fuser unit that is used in an image forming apparatus of an electrophotographic method, it is known that a fuser unit of which a heat source (heat generator) such as halogen lamp, a thermistor (temperature detecting member) and the like are arranged at the inside of a belt (heating belt) made of a heat-resistant film. In the fuser unit, the heat source is controlled based on temperatures detected by the temperature detection unit, so that a fixing temperature and the like are controlled.


This disclosure relates generally to radio frequency (RF) front-end circuitry for routing RF signals to and/or from one or more antennas. Exemplary RF front-end circuitry includes a multiple throw solid-state transistor switch (MTSTS) and a multiple throw microelectromechanical switch (MTMEMS). The MTSTS may be configured to selectively couple a first pole port to any one of a first set of throw ports. The MTMEMS is configured to selectively couple a second pole port to any one of a second set of throw ports. The second pole port of the MTMEMS is coupled to a first throw port in the first set of throw ports of the MTSTS. The MTSTS helps prevent hot switching in the MTMEMS since the first throw port of the MTSTS may be decoupled from the second pole port of the MTMEMS before decoupling the second pole port from a selectively coupled throw port of the MTMEMS.

Radio frequency (RF) front-end modules are utilized in mobile communication devices (e.g., laptops, cellular phones, tablets, etc.) to handle RF signals transmitted to the mobile communication devices and/or received by the mobile communication devices. Manufacturers and consumers of mobile communication devices continue to demand increasingly greater rates of data exchange (data rates) and the ability to handle RF signals formatted in accordance with an increasing variety of RF communication standards and RF communication specifications. As such, the RF front-end module may include RF transceiver circuitry with a plurality of different transmit chains and receiver chains in order to process the various types of RF signals. The RF front-end modules may thus include RF front-end circuitry, such as antenna switching circuitry, that allows for RF signals to be routed to the various transmit chains and receiver chains from one or more common antennas. However, modern RF communication standards, such as a Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, present significant routing, switching, and performance challenges to RF front-end circuitry. For example, different specifications under the LTE standard may involve the use of RF signals within high frequency bands, high and frequent switching, and/or multiple RF signals. Current RF front-end circuitry capable of providing this type of switching functionality often suffers from inadequate isolation between the various chains of the RF transceiver circuitry. Microelectromechanical switches (MEMSs) are one type of switching technology known to provide high levels of isolation. Unfortunately, MEMSs can have limited lifetimes as a result of hot switching. Hot switching occurs when a switch makes a state change while RF power is incident on the switch. With regard to MEMSs, hot switching has been shown to significantly degrade the useful lifetime of a MEMS by heating, softening, and deforming the contact surfaces of the MEMS. This RF power incident during state changes of the MEMS can come, for example, from Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) signals and cellular signals tuned to bands greater than 2.3 GHz. Wi-Fi signals can be particularly problematic because Wi-Fi antennas and cellullar antennas in a mobile communication device are likely to be in close proximity and tuned to similar frequencies. This allows the Wi-Fi transmission signals transmitted from the Wi-Fi antenna to be efficiently received by the cellular antenna. However, this also presents a risk of damaging the MEMS, since any significant incident power when a MEMS changes state presents a significant risk of damaging the MEMS. Furthermore, modern signal coding and multiplexing schemes may require high levels of switching as a result of on/off cycles. This presents an additional risk of damaging the MEMS. For instance, LTE-Time Division Duplex (TDD) techniques may require repetitive switching between RF transmission signals and RF receive signals. As such, the MEMS may begin to develop reliability issues due to the high number of on/off cycles, which can tend to wear out the components of the MEMS. Also, some MEMSs take longer to make a state change and may not be capable of switching between RF transmission signals and RF receive signals within a time budget specified by an LTE-TDD specification.
As such, RF front-end circuitry is needed that is capable of using MEMSs to route RF signals, but is also capable of meeting the time budgets required by high frequency LTE-TDD specifications, while reducing hot switching and wear on the MEMSs.

RF front-end circuitry with transistor and microelectromechanical multiple throw switches


Disclosed is a method for generating a panoramic image of a region of interest (ROI) which is larger than a field of a view of a radiation based imaging device, comprising, positioning markers along the ROI, acquiring a set of images along the ROI, wherein the acquired images have at least partially overlapping portions, aligning at least two separate images by aligning a common marker found in both images and compensating for a difference between a distance from a radiation source to the marker element and the distance from the radiation source to a plane of interest.

Fluoroscopic x-ray images play a key-role in a variety of surgical procedures, e.g., fracture reduction, pedicle screw insertion and implant positioning for treating hip fractures. The surgeon uses the mobile fluoroscopic x-ray machine (C-arm) in the operation room (OR), to determine the position and orientation of bones, implants and surgical instruments. X-ray fluoroscopy instruments have several limitations, one of which is a narrow field of view (FOV) which prevents imaging a large region of interest (ROI), e.g., in the case of long implants placement. A way to address this issue is to acquire several individual overlapping images of the ROI and to compose the equivalent of a single x-ray image by finding adequate correlation between the single images. The final panoramic (or mosaic) image may therefore be several times wider than the original field of view of the apparatus.
Panoramic x-ray views can be useful during various stages of many orthopedic surgery procedures. Preoperatively, they serve for diagnosis and measurements. Intraoperatively, where they are particularly useful, they help avoid positioning errors and enable the surgeon to have a global, unornamented vision of the ROI. Postoperatively, they can also provide useful information concerning the outcome of the surgery.
Panoramic X ray imaging is useful in other areas of medical imaging as well, including cardiovascular angiography of long blood vessels and Digital Radiography (DR) of skeleton parts such as the spine or legs. Modem DR is based on digital X ray detectors which are typically limited in coverage to 43 cm. Longer anatomies are imaged by taking several overlapping images and stitching them together.
Creating panoramic views out of individual images is known in the prior art, and constitutes a very active field of research in the domain of graphic computing. Techniques for composing a panoramic image are disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. No. 5,262,856 and a method for automatic alignment of individual overlapping pictures can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,032. In brief, generation of panoramic images requires three distinct steps: 1) correcting the distortion of each single image, generally caused by the optical system, 2) alignment and stitching of the individual images and 3) composing the final panoramic image. Several publications relate to methods for correcting optical distortion in x-ray digital imaging such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,736,399 or 6,618,494. However, the most difficult step remains aligning and stitching the individual pictures.
To illustrate geometrical difficulties in generating a panoramic image we consider an x-ray imaging system 100 as shown schematically in FIG. 1, x-ray source 102 emits conical beam 104 which is received by area detector 106. System 100 is used to generate one X ray image at a first position and then both the source 102 and detector 106 are translated laterally by a distance X and used to generate a second image at a second position. Objects A,B,C and D represent features of interest in the imaging field. Object A in plane 108 is in the overlap region of the two images so it appears in both images. In order to stitch the images, object A may be identified in each of the two images and the images translated relative to each other till the object accurately overlaps in the two images. Under these conditions other features in plane 108 will appear focused in the stitched panoramic image. However, object B in plane 110 will appear blurred or doubled in the stitched image, and object C and D in plane 110 (which are not in overlap region) will appear focused but at the wrong distance between them.
In general, image alignment can only be achieved at a certain distance from the x-ray source, a surface known as the plane of interest (POI). Despite its name, The POI is not limited to a single spatial plane, for example, in a whole leg panoramic image, it is sometimes useful to stitch along both the (possibly different) femur and the tibia planes. In fact, the POI can be any continuous spatial surface between the x-ray source and the detector. Stitching of images according to a certain POI causes objects out of the POI to be "blurred", a phenomenon commonly called parallax error.
The physical overlap between the images, the geometric constraints on imaging system position, and the type of mapping between images are considered to be the major parameters influencing the stitching procedure (Ziv et Josckowicz, IEEE Trans. on Med. Im., 23(1):1-9). Information related to imaging system translation is either provided by the motion control system in automated motion, or by image analysis methods. Early prior art stitching methods which were based on image analysis rely on identification of specific features in consecutive pictures. However, detection and alignment of prominent anatomical features in x-ray fluoroscopic imaging is considered unreliable and occasionally inaccurate. Therefore, other methods using artificial markers specifically positioned within the FOV were developed, as for example described in EP 1 632 181. When one or several markers, being localized precisely in the plane, are present in two consecutive images, the exact translation can be computed accordingly.
Alternatively, Ziv and Joskowicz propose a method for focusing the panoramic image about the true ROI using a manual phase in which the user indicates the edges that are to be "in focus" and the POI is set accordingly [Ziv et Josckowicz, IEEE Trans. on Med. Im., 23(1):1-9].
A software and hardware package commercially called "SmartStitch" is distributed by CMT Medical Technology Ltd. of Yogne'ham, Israel. The package allows for acquisition of several digital x-ray images wherein the x-ray source and detector are moved in parallel relative to the patient between shots and the patient is held still. An x-ray ruler operative to generate ruler marks on the X ray images is placed alongside the patient. In order for the stitching to be successful, the ruler must be positioned at the same distance from the source as the anatomic features of interest, for example spine or legs. The stitching operation involves alignment of the ruler marks in the regions of overlap between successive images. The resulted panoramic image provides a focused accurate image for features in the plane of the ruler but not in other planes. SmartStitch does not provide a solution for cases where the POI and anatomic features therein are tilted relative to the imaging system and it's motion. Similar packages are provided by other vendors of DR and CR systems.
Some other solutions to obtain panoramic views by stitching multiple X-ray images can be found in the following patents:                EP 0 655 861 and corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 6,097,833 provides an image composition method by overlapping a series of consecutive sub-images acquired by an x-ray source and image intensifier translated along the length of the patient. In order to match accurately consecutive sub-images in the stitching process, the shift between two positions of the imager is determined by finding maximum correlation between the pixel-values in overlapping portions. The above references also suggest the use of an x-ray ruler embedded in the table on which the patient lies. However, they do not propose a solution of how to reconstruct focused images at any POI.        EP 1 255 403 relates to an image composition method for use in digital x-ray imaging. The apparatus consists of a mobile detector, that can be translated along an axis in front of a static x-ray source having a specific collimator enabling the synchronized orientation of the cone beam with the detector positions. The same effect can be obtained by variably tilting the X ray source as the detector is moved without changing the focal spot position. This method eliminates the stereovision-like geometric distortion but cannot be implemented in standard C-arm equipment since on a C arm the source and the detector move together.        U.S. Pat. No. 5,123,056 to Wilson provides a processing and display technique for panoramic images of a whole leg in peripheral angiography setting, based on processing and display of high resolution images and low resolution images, wherein alignment of overlapping images is achieved by a manual or automatic optimization of the visual appearance of features in the POI.        U.S. Pat. No. 5,833,607 to Chou et. al. and U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,238 to Murthy et. al., both assigned to Siemens AG, Germany described other image composition methods for use in peripheral angiography. The x-ray examination apparatus consists of a motorized C-arm which acquires overlapping images by simultaneous translation of the x-ray source and the image intensifier. The images are processed to emphasize certain features and are aligned by detecting and matching meaningful features on a reconstruction plane.
This survey of the prior art shows that most of the methods used for creating panoramic views based on multiple x-ray images are based on expensive and bulky systems that cannot be used intraoperatively. Moreover, some methods developed specifically for x-ray fluoroscopic panoramic imaging, preferably use the position of the x-ray source of the apparatus as reference for stitching consecutive images. All of these systems at least partially correct the parallax error at a specific plane, but the POI is hard to manipulate. Also, these systems are unable to provide a metrical system that can enable the surgeon to measure features lengths and orientations on the resulting image
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a system that can be used to obtain x-ray panoramic views of a region of interest, larger than the field of view of the imaging apparatus.
It is another object of this invention to provide a system that can provide such x-ray panoramic views of a region of interest, focused at a POI adjustable by the operator according to the anatomy of interest.
It is still another object of this invention to provide a method for stitching multiple x-ray images and compose a panoramic view, based on specific features appearing in consecutive images where the specific features are not necessarily positioned in the POI.
It is still another object of this invention to provide a system that can be adapted to a mobile C-arm fluoroscopic machine in an operating room to obtain panoramic views intraoperatively.
It is still another object of this invention to provide the possibility of performing metric measurements in the reconstruction plane.
It is a further object of this invention to provide the possibility of inserting an additional image in a composed panoramic image.
Other objects and advantages of present invention will appear as the description proceeds.

Method and system for stitching multiple images into a panoramic image


One example method includes receiving, by a first node, a first message from a second node, wherein the first message is used to page a third node, instruct the third node to access a network, instruct the first node to provide a relay serving for the third node, instruct to set the third node to a low configuration mode, instruct to set the third node to a high configuration mode, or instruct to update system information. The first node can send a second message to a third node, where the second message is used to instruct the third node to access a network, instruct the third node to perform communication with a second node by using the first node, instruct to set the third node to a low configuration mode, instruct to set the third node to a high configuration mode, or instruct the third node to update system information.

To expand coverage of a network service, a user equipment-to-network relay (UE-to-network relay) technology is introduced in a related art.
In the UE-to-network relay technology, a relay device is usually located within coverage of a base station, but a device that needs to connect to a network may not be located within the coverage of the base station. To enable the device that needs to connect to the network to connect to the base station, the relay device needs to forward data between the base station and the device that needs to connect to the base station. For example, a first node is used as a relay device, and a third node is used as a device that needs to connect to a network. The first node establishes a device-to-device (D2D) connection to the third node. The first node forwards downlink data sent by a base station to the third node, or forwards uplink data sent by the third node to the base station, thereby making it possible to provide a network service for the base station and the third node.
When the third node uses the first node as the relay device to implement communication between the third node and the base station, the D2D connection between the third node and the first node needs to be maintained; in addition, a link between the third node and the base station needs to be maintained. The third node needs to listen to at least system information, a paging message, and the like of the base station periodically when maintaining the link between the third node and the base station. Therefore, power consumption of the third node is relatively high in a D2D communication process.

Device-to-device communication method, apparatus, and device