Report of the second STREAM regional conference. Tagaytay City, Philippines 8-10 June 2003

The Second STREAM Regional Conference was held in Tagaytay City, Philippines, from 8-10 June 2003 with the participation of 23 people from Australia, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan (China). Following a regional overview of STREAM’s themes, country partners, donors and funding, and activities, participants visited four “stations” on the themes of livelihoods, institutions, policy development, and communications, working in groups representing National Coordinators, Communications Hub Managers, and Partners. They engaged in discussions with a “station leader” and each other to learn about and comment on objectives, activities, outcomes and outputs, and to consider issues that need addressing in STREAM. (PDF has 49 pages.

On the Periphery of the Russo-Japanese War - Part I

Chapman: Major defects in British naval intelligence were the absence of an effective central department, an inferior network of naval attachés in major capitals prior to 1902 and the lack of secure direct cable communications with Northeast Asia. The performance of the Naval Intelligence Department was changed for the better by the efforts of Lord Selborne as First Lord of the Admiralty (1900-5). Selborne's promotion of Britain's alliance with Japan was conditional on a close working relationship with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.Nish: There was considerable uncertainty and indecision about whether China would take part in the Russo-Japanese war. Finally under considerable outside pressure she declared strict neutrality. Since the civil administration in her Three Eastern Provinces (Manchuria) was in Chinese hands, she inevitably had a role in the war; and her people suffered much.The Portsmouth treaties that ended the war could only be implemented with China's agreement. Foreign Minister Komura had to conclude new treaties with China at the Peking Conference on 22 December 1905.Japan, China, Russia, Manchuria, Britain, Admiralty, Fisher, Selborne, Balfour, Uchida, Komura, Yuna Shikai, Great Northern Telegraphs, Naval Intelligence, Portsmouth Conference, Peking Conference.

Lightweight Security for Network Coding

Under the emerging network coding paradigm, intermediate nodes in the network are allowed not only to store and forward packets but also to process and mix different data flows. We propose a low-complexity cryptographic scheme that exploits the inherent security provided by random linear network coding and offers the advantage of reduced overhead in comparison to traditional end-to-end encryption of the entire data. Confidentiality is achieved by protecting (or "locking") the source coefficients required to decode the encoded data, without preventing intermediate nodes from running their standard network coding operations. Our scheme can be easily combined with existing techniques that counter active attacks.Comment: Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2008), Beijing, China, May 200

VCG-based time-slot auctioning in IEEE 802.16 OFDM/TDMA wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we study the problem of bandwidth resource allocation in a non-cooperative IEEE 802.16 OFDM/TDMA based wireless mesh network, and propose an auction based framework in which the gateway, equipped with the precious high speed Internet connection, serves as the auctioneer while the first-level mesh routers (MRs) (i.e., those with direct wireless connections to the gateway) act as bidders competing resources among each other. We then present Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) based auction approaches to allocate time-slots among MRs. Through simulations, we find that the proposed VCG algorithms can achieve much better throughput and connection blocking probability performance than traditional resource allocation approaches in a non-cooperative environment. ©2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 5th International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing (WiCOM 2009), Beijing, China, 24-26 September 2009. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing, 2009, p. 1-

Local polynomial modeling and bandwidth selection for time-varying linear models

This paper proposes a local polynomial modeling approach and bandwidth selection algorithm for estimating time-varying linear models (TVLM). The time-varying coefficients of a TVLM are modeled locally by polynomials and estimated using least-squares estimation with a kernel having a certain bandwidth or support. Asymptotic behavior of the proposed estimator is established and it shows that there exists an optimal local bandwidth which minimizes the weighted mean squared error (MSE). A data-driven variable bandwidth selection method is also proposed to estimate this optimal bandwidth. Simulation results show that the proposed LPM method with adaptive bandwidth selection outperforms conventional TVLM identification methods in a large variety of testing conditions. ©2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 7th International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing (ICICS 2009), Macau, China, 8-10 December 2009. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing, 2009, p. 1-

Local polynomial modeling and bandwidth selection for time-varying linear models

This paper proposes a local polynomial modeling approach and bandwidth selection algorithm for estimating time-varying linear models (TVLM). The time-varying coefficients of a TVLM are modeled locally by polynomials and estimated using least-squares estimation with a kernel having a certain bandwidth or support. Asymptotic behavior of the proposed estimator is established and it shows that there exists an optimal local bandwidth which minimizes the weighted mean squared error (MSE). A data-driven variable bandwidth selection method is also proposed to estimate this optimal bandwidth. Simulation results show that the proposed LPM method with adaptive bandwidth selection outperforms conventional TVLM identification methods in a large variety of testing conditions. ©2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 7th International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing (ICICS 2009), Macau, China, 8-10 December 2009. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing, 2009, p. 1-

A hybrid algorithm for spatial and wavelet domain image restoration

The recent algorithm ForWaRD based on the two steps: (i) the Fourier domain deblurring and (ii) wavelet domain denoising, shows better restoration results than those using traditional image restoration methods. In this paper, we study other deblurring schemes in ForWaRD and demonstrate such two-step approach is effective for image restoration.published_or_final_versionS P I E Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing 2005, Beijing, China, 12-15 July 2005. In Proceedings Of Spie - The International Society For Optical Engineering, 2005, v. 5960 n. 4, p. 59605V-1 - 59605V-

A Universal Receiver for Uplink NOMA Systems

Given its capability in efficient radio resource sharing, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been identified as a promising technology in 5G to improve the system capacity, user connectivity, and scheduling latency. A dozen of uplink NOMA schemes have been proposed recently and this paper considers the design of a universal receiver suitable for all potential designs of NOMA schemes. Firstly, a general turbo-like iterative receiver structure is introduced, under which, a universal expectation propagation algorithm (EPA) detector with hybrid parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is proposed (EPA in short). Link-level simulations show that the proposed EPA receiver can achieve superior block error rate (BLER) performance with implementation friendly complexity and fast convergence, and is always better than the traditional codeword level MMSE-PIC receiver for various kinds of NOMA schemes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC 2018). 5 pages, 4 figure