Actuator operation in a liquid is described using vibration motion on the side surface of a cylindrical piezoelectric vibrator. A foam urethan layer is indispensable for the suppression of the acoustic energy radiation into the liquid. An ultrasonic motor in water is demonstrated successfully.

This letter considers a problem of realizing an undirected vertex-capacitated network from the view of two types; flow-saturated and flow-unsaturated. As a result, two necessary and sufficient conditions for a given matrix to be realizable as a flow-saturated network and as both a flow-saturated network and a flow-unsaturated one have been shown.

A muscle membrane model (the same form as the Hodgkin-Huxley (H-H) equations for the squid axon) at low chloride conductance is shown to have a stable periodic solution, a stable equilibrium point and two unstable equilibrium points simultaneously. This structure does not appear in the H-H equations.

This letter describes the waveform relaxation method with local iteration and window partition techniques for the simulation of the circuit containing feedback loops. Finally, we apply this algorithm to the transient analysis of MOS circuits and verify its availability.

This letter describes the relaxation-based circuit simulation in the frequency domain. First, we present Iterated Spectrum Analysis, where the harmonic balance method is applied to each node. Furthermore, we refer to frequency domain latency and verify its availability for spectrum analysis.

This letter describes the waveform relaxation algorithm with the under relaxation technique. This method enables to exploit the multirate behavior, keeping numerical stability. Finally, we apply this algorithm to MOS circuit analysis and verify its availability.

This letter describes a semi-random searching algorithm for global optimization problems which can reduce the number of objective function evaluations significantly via a deterministic criterion and can find a global optimum via a stochastic criterion. The utility of this algorithm is demonstrated by several examples.

This letter proposes a new framework for ASIP (Application Specific Integrated Processor) development. The system is called IDEAS (Integrated Design Environment for Application Specific Integrated Processor). IDEAS accepts a set of application programs and its expected data as input, and profiles these programs both statically and dynamically. According to the profiled results, the system decides the architecture of ASIP, and synthesizes the CPU core design of the ASIP, and generates the software development tools for the ASIP such as compiler and simulator.

A method for realizing current-mode biquadratic transfer functions using current conveyors (CC s) is presented, and novel networks which realize the generalized 2nd-order transfer function are given. The networks are composed of CC s with grounded capacitors, and offer high output impedances.

Secondary phase modulation was proposed for lowering the signal frequency band of open-loop optical fiber gyroscopes. Extracting the lowered frequency spectra, the rotation rate was derived from the gyroscope signal and the drift in the optical parameters were compensated.

This letter proposes an edge-adaptive estimation algorithm for estimating the mean and standard deviation of the image block in the Mean-Separated and Normalized Vector Quantizer with Feedback Estimation (FMSN-VQ). The adaptation is performed according to the block state which is estimated from its neighboring coded blocks with the consideration of the edge presence and orientation. The simulation results show that the estimation error is significantly reduced and higher SNR is achieved compared to FMSN-VQ with a fixed estimator. Furthermore, this algorithm adds very little complexity.

This letter considers the problem of approximating and interpolating a two-dimensional (2-dim) signal as the ordinary picture or image signal. We first formulate the problem on the basis of the recent works, and then give a network for the approximation and interpolation. Further, using the network, we present an algorithm for the modeling of a 2-dim signal.

The authors propose a model of the top down parser for continuous speech recognition. It utilizes a subject of an input sentence for its top down process and a preceding transition among subjects for the determination of a new subject. A task, a washing machine operation, which has five subjects are examined.

The difference is investigated between the effects of meaningless and meaningful noise on performance of a task, along with the relevance of the contents of the noise. The extent to which noise content affects task performance is measured and used to set environmental noise assessment. The use of meaningless noise to obscure meaningful noise is also investigated.

Although the previously proposed indistinctness-degree-glossiness is applicable for a curved surface's specimen, it has fairly large errors by the deviation of specimen from the normal holding position. In order to reduce such the glossiness errors, the convolution was made on the reflected-light-intensity distribution of the specimen by the spatial filter. From its results, a new glossiness G_m was defined and the glossiness errors were reduced to 1/3, compared with the old glossiness errors.

A new glossiness measuring method using the PSD was proposed. This method might be used for the glossiness classification of the specimens such as a high-grade pearls with small gloss-difference, as the substitution of the human visual function.

In order to evaluate motor function of upper limb in normal and pathological persons, we studied the manual tracking motion whose controlled object is reversal element. We suggest that proposing evaluation parameters reflect clinical symptoms of patients.

This letter describes system architecture of a measurement environment called GINGER that helps programmer productivity by automatically collecting and analyzing data about software development activities. Based on the result of analysis, the environment gives programmers feedback so that they can recognize and improve their activities. The first prototype system of GINGER is currently implemented in a UNIX environment. We expect that the proposed environment will improve the overall productivity of programmers and the quality of resulting products.

The condition is calculated for many dielectric cylinders to be randomly distributed for the coherent wave in the medium. The condition is useful for the computer simulation of random distribution of scatterers and for precise calculation of the equivalent dielectric constant of the medium.

A novel algorithm based on Kalman filtering is developed for the learning of a layered neural network. The problem of adjusting the weight can be regarded as that of estimating a signal state vector of a linear process. The proposed algorithm, though computationally complex, has an adaptively varying learning rate, while the back-propagation algorithm has constant learning rate. Some experiments conducted for XOR and auto-associative image compression problems have shown that the proposed learning algorithm usually converges in a few iterations and the error is comparable to that of the well-known back-propagation algorithm.