We report on an 100 MHz repetition rate integrated photonic transmitter at 850 nm with arbitrary amplitude and polarization modulation. The source is suitable for free-space quantum communication links, in particular for quantum key distribution applications. The whole transmitter, with the optical and electronic components integrated, has reduced size and power consumption. In addition, the optoelectronic components forming the transmitter can be space-qualified, making it suitable for satellite and future space missions.

Through new interactive features, television is becoming a central hub for entertainment, communication, and sharing. Instead of old, push-based broadcasting to set-top-boxes, new pull-based, interactive services and tighter integration with other audio/visual entertainment devices enable ambient access to tv programming. Thus, with the steering committee members, Marina Geymonat (Telecom Italia, Italy) and Roberto Rossetto (RAI-Teche, Italy), we have envisioned and organized the Ambient Media Delivery and Interactive Television workshop, AMDIT 2008, focusing on the data management challenges associated with the design of ambient media delivery and user aware interactive television systems, to make television programmes available and easily accessible in multiple contexts, through diverse media devices. Below, I provide an overview of the contributions to the workshop.

We present 2-Chord Halved, a distributed peer-to-peer lookup protocol. Our proposal is based on Chord exhibit the following advantages: i) We show a stabilization procedure that eliminates the fixfinger procedure of Chord protocol. Our strategy allows to inform each node on the ring that is interested to a topological change. Fixfinger in Chord costs O(log2 N) messages when it is ran on all finger table entries even if the finger table is up to date, contrariwise our stabilization procedure, that has the same cost, is ran only if there are join or leave operations and only on the interested nodes. ii) We present a new strategy to implement the join/leave operations using the predecessor's finger table of joined node and exploiting the fingers of predecessor as start point searching new fingers. This procedure costs O(logN log logN) w.h.p., contrariwise to Chord within join/leave operation cost O(log2 N) w.h.p. iii) We show a new routing strategy that has a moderate improvement on average path length. The improvements are obtained with no harm to the operational efficiency (e.g. stability, scalability, fault-tolerance, node congestion) of the Chord systems.

The current increment of the service portfolio for mobile communications and the related traffic load require an extension of the capacities in the mobile networks. As a consequence, mobile network operators have to replace part of the traditional equipment based on 2G GSM/GPRS by the 3G equipment based on UMTS and even start the path in direction to the 4G installing HSPA. This leads to techno-economical studies which require a corresponding service network model and its implementation in form of a computer support planning tool. This paper presents such a model and the structure and characteristics of the corresponding tool 2G/3G-Conncet. The paper also indicates corresponding applications.

A photonic 2x2 node architecture for synchronous all-optical packet switching networks, able to process ultra-fast packet signals is presented. All node functions (label recognition and processing, contention detection and resolution, switch control, actual switching, and regeneration) are optically performed. Combinations of the proposed 2times2 element can be used in order to obtain more complex NtimesN photonic nodes. Implementations of all subsystems needed to realize the describe 2times2 photonic node are reported, and different solutions for several blocks are compared in order to optimize the node performances.

In this paper we report on a transdisciplinary university course designed to bring together fine art/visual communication design and computer science students for the creation and implementation of collaborative visual/audio projects that draw upon the specialized knowledge of both these disciplines. While an overview of the syllabus and the teaching methodologies is undertaken in the introduction, the focus of the paper concentrates upon an in-depth discussion and analysis of 3 specific projects that were developed by 3 distinct teams of students comprised of one artist/designer and one engineer each.

We propose a novel paradigm of consuming rich web content in a mobile setting (which are often eyes-free), through a predominantly 3D audio interface. Web content, formatted in audio, is streamed via the mobile device’s network connection, and placed virtually in a 3D audio space. The user moves in the virtual space, using a variety of human computer interaction (HCI) means, such as voice input, touching, rotating, and shaking the device, as well as hand and head gesturing. We provide applications benefitting from this paradigm of rich mobile 3D audio web consumption. We provide system designs, and a system architecture for mobile 3D audio. Finally, we implement our ideas in a system prototype using the Apple iOS mobile platform.

In this work, a novel 3D CMOL crossnet structure is introduced by combining two leading technological concepts for future nanoelectronic neuromorphic networks: CMOL crossnet and 3D integration. By implementing CMOL crossnet into the third dimension, the proposed 3D CMOL crossnet not only maintains the high-speed and high defect-tolerant properties of the CMOS-nano hybrid CMOL hardware system, but also provides efficient fabrication and assembly processes with a much higher density than the original CMOL crossnet. Furthermore, this study focuses on the development of multivalue synapses and efficient communication methods between CMOS and nanodevices. Preliminary results demonstrate that the structure can utilize the advantages of high performance synapses and stable analog CMOS somas in three dimensions. Therefore, the proposed 3D CMOL crossnet structure has a huge potential to become an efficient 3D hardware platform to build neuromorphic networks that are scalable to biological levels.

This paper presents a method for robust watermarking of medical volume data using 3D-DCT. A feature vector of the volume data is utilized to enhance the robustness against rotation, scaling, translation, and cropping changes. The proposed algorithm utilizes the volume data’s feature, Hash function, the third party authentication. We describe how to obtain the feature vector of medical volume data and embed and extract the watermarking. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed algorithm’s robustness against rotation up to 30°, against scaling down to 20% of the image’s original size, and against translation transform up to 10%.

This work focuses on 3D interaction assistance by adding adaptivity depending on the tasks, the objectives, and the general interaction context. An engine to reach context-awareness has been implemented in Prolog+CG which uses Conceptual Graphs (CGs) based on an ontology. CGs descriptions of the available sensors and actuators in our scene manager (Virtools) allow the engine to take decisions and send them through Open Sound Control (OSC). Measurements and adaptations corresponding to specific tools uses are decided from rules handled by the engine. This project is a step towards Intelligent Virtual Environments, which proposes a hybrid solution by adding a separate semantic reasoning to classic environments. The first experiment automatically manages few modalities depending on the distance to objects, user movement, available tools, etc. Gestures are used both as an engine direct control and as an interpretation of user activity.

Three-dimensional virtual environments are becoming more and more important for the inspection of volumetric medical data reconstructed from slices of images coming from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computer Tomography (CT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) instrumentations. The possibility to visualize and interact with three-dimensional reconstructed organs while being immersed into a virtual environment, provides doctors a very naturalistic way to investigate patient’s anatomy. However, most 3D user interfaces for immersive and semiimmersive virtual reality applications lack in usability or make not possible a user-friendly interaction. In this paper we present new flavors of existing 3D interaction techniques specifically designed for interacting with volumetric medical data in a semi-immersive virtual environment by using the Nintendo Wiimote controller as 3D user interface.

This paper presents a 3D full time-domain modelling of the time reversal process for the localization of a dielectric ob- stacle buried in an homogeneous half-space using an array of dipoles. The main purpose of this study is to propose a local- ization method based on the analysis of the ElectroMagnetic (EM) energy of the back-propagated elds. A Generalized Finite Dierence (GFD) method and a leapfrog time dis- cretization are used to get the numerical results.

In nanowire-based logic, the semiconducting material (e.g., Si, GaN, SiGe) is grown into individual nanowires rather than being part of the substrate. This offers us the opportunity to stack multiple layers of nanowires to create a three-dimensional logic structure which has high quality semiconductors in all vertical layers. The authors detail a feasible three-dimensional programmable logic architecture which can plausibly be realized from layers of semiconducting nanowires, making only modest assumptions about the control and placement of individual nanowires in the assembly. This shows a natural path for continuing to scale areal logic density once nanowire pitches approach fundamental limits. The authors show that the three dimensional systems are volumetrically efficient, with the surface area reducing roughly in proportion to the number of vertical layers. The authors further show that, on average, delay is reduced 18% from compact layout in three dimensions. For only a 20% area impact, the authors show how to avoid adding any manufacturing steps to physically isolate portions of nanowire layers

We propose a 3D architecture using post-silicon devices, such as nano-mechanical electrical switches, carbon nanotube FETs, and nanowire FETs, for future networks-on-chip (NoC). Based on such a new 3D architecture, extremely high bandwidth with very low latency can be realized. These promising features are very useful for future NoCs

In this paper, we present a new camera system combining a time-of-flight depth camera and multiple video cameras to generate a multiview video-plus-depth. In order to get the 3-D video using the hybrid camera system, we first obtain a multiview image from the multiview camera and a depth map from the depth camera. Then, initial depths of each view image are estimated by performing 3-D warping with the depth map. Thereafter, multiview depth estimation using the initial depths is carried out to get each view initial disparity map. Finally, we refine the initial disparity map using a belief propagation algorithm so that we can generate the high-quality multiview disparity map. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid camera system produces a 3-D video with more accurate multiview depths and supports more natural 3-D views than the previous works.

In this paper we propose a new watermarking approach for 3D polygonal meshes. In the field of multimedia watermarking, mesh watermarking is less advanced than image or video. The main difficulty is due to the irregular structure of 3D meshes that makes them more vulnerable to attacks. To address this issue, we introduce a new criterion -accessibility in the common 3D graphics software-for selecting attacks and propose a list of common attacks based on this criterion. Consequently, in this paper, we consider attacks like cut, change of the format, affine transformation, subdivision and small scale deformation that are usually found in the graphical software. We present several schemes to achieve robustness against these attacks. Watermark embedding is done by perturbing the vertices in their tangent space that provides us invisibility of the watermark. Hiding capacity in this method is as big as the number of the vertices of the mesh that is usually big enough for expensive 3D meshes.

Points matching between two or more images of a scene shot from different viewpoints is the crucial step to defining epipolar geometry between views, recover the camera’s egomotion or build a 3D model of the framed scene. Unfortunately in most of the common cases robust correspondences between points in different images can be defined only when small variations in viewpoint position, focal length or lighting are present between images. While in all the other conditions ad-hoc assumptions on the 3D scene or just weak correspondences can be used. In this paper, we present a novel matching method where depth-maps, nowadays available from cheap and off the shelf devices, are integrated with 2D images to provide robust descriptors even when wide baseline or strong lighting variations are present.

We present an intelligent learning system for improving pregnancy success rate of IVF treatment. Our proposed model uses an SVM based classification system for training a model from past data and making predictions on implantation outcome of new embryos. This study employs an embryo-centered approach. Each embryo is represented with a data feature vector including 17 features related to patient characteristics, clinical diagnosis, treatment method and embryo morphological parameters. Our experimental results demonstrate a prediction accuracy of 82.7%. We have obtained the IVF dataset from Bahceci Women Health, Care Centre, in Istanbul, Turkey.

We demonstrate experimentally a 43 Gb/s DWDM optical transmission system over 900 km single mode fiber with 100 km spans using NRZ format and Raman amplification without FEC. A commercial LiNbO3 modulator and a self-designed 43 Gb/s transmitter based on electro-absorption modulator and are compared in the system, and for the first time the electro-absorption modulation is shown to be able to realize up to 1200 km transmission with a power penalty less than 2 dB. This system includes 8 channels of 43 Gb/s DWDM signal and can support 40 channels over C band. Transmission over 1500 km is also presented and the influence of polarization mode dispersion is shown to be a main limitation.

New wireless communications systems at 60 GHz are a promising solution to reach Giga-bit data rates for short range communications, e.g., for in-flight-entertainment (IFE) systems. For shadowed 60 GHz IFE systems, high resolution and multi-antenna time-varying channel characterisation are mandatory. This paper presents the first wideband 60 GHz real-time multi-antenna channel sounder (MCS) and measurement results within an Airbus-340 aircraft cabin. The MCS is a 3 GHz bandwidth system based on a modular architecture with 2 real-time acquisition channels enabled with a dynamic range up to 40 dB. This system architecture allowed the study of different in-cabin access point (AP) configurations and the inclusion of correlated shadowing by human bodies (SHB) for macro-diversity implementations. The frequency, phase and impulse response of the MCS has been tested based on back-to-back calibration data and its dynamic range verified. As example of the 60 GHz MCS application, the delay spread and the coherent bandwidth have been calculated for the in-cabin channel. Besides, comparisons between static and time-variant conditions are presented.

SONET ADMs are dominant cost factors in WDM/SONET rings. Whereas most previous papers on the topic concentrated on the number of wavelengths assigned to a given set of lightpaths, more recent papers argue that the number of ADMs is a more realistic cost measure. Some of these works discuss various heuristic algorithms for this problem, and the best known result is a 3/2 approximation in G. Calinescu and P.J. Wan (2001). Through the study of the relation between this problem and the problem of finding maximum disjoint rings in a given set of lightpaths we manage to shed more light onto this problem and to develop a 10/7 + ε approximation for it.

The carrier tunneling dynamics of self-assembled InAs quantum dots (QD) is studied using time-resolved conductance measurements of a nearby two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The coupling strength (tunneling time) between the QDs and the 2DEG is adjusted by different thicknesses of the spacer layers. We demonstrate a strong influence of charged QDs on the conductance on the 2DEG, even for very weak coupling, where standard C-V spectroscopy is unsuitable to investigate the electronic structure of these QDs.

In recent years simulation has been the most used tool for performance analysis of communication networks, due to the ever increasing complexity of modern architectures and technologies. There are two correlated problems that are typically encountered when using simulation, especially by less experienced practitioners. Often, the number of factors that affect the response of such systems is high, which makes it difficult to distinguish their relative impact on the performance. Secondly, it would be helpful to know which are the most important factors before running the actual simulation campaign, so as to reduce the number of scenarios, hence the overall computational time, which otherwise can grow unnecessarily large. Both these problems are alleviated substantially if well-established methodologies, e.g. the 2k × r factorial analysis, are employed. In this work we present a new tool that implement all the procedures for running a 2k × r factorial analysis in a simple and sound manner. The tool, called factorial2kr, has been developed within the ns2measure framework, which is an integrated module, in a mature state of development, for collecting and analyzing statistical data with the widely used network simulator ns-2. The software is released under GPL.

The 3GPP System Architecture Evolution (SAE) is a very attractive environment from the service provisioning perspective, thanks to the variety of access technologies and mobility features introduced. In such a diverse environment, experimentation infrastructures (i.e., testbeds) become a key instrument for telecom operators, since mobility solutions and service behavior in their presence need to be validated under the different possible configurations from early development stages. However, the complexity of 3GPP SAE scenarios hinders conventional testbeds from adhering to cost-effectiveness and business-oriented criteria, due to the high infrastructure and operational costs involved. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper proposes an experimentation infrastructure that, based on combining virtualization techniques with several of the available open source IMS and mobility toolkits, allows the easy creation and deployment of complex 3GPP SAE network emulation scenarios while minimizing the associated expenditures.

This paper presents the development methodology, circuit realization and measurement of a cryptographic core intended to operate reliably in the presence of massive defect density. A circuit-level voter based on averaging and thresholding has been implemented, and is measured to offer superior reliability in comparison with standard techniques.