This paper presents low-switching-loss and low-switching-noise gate driver for Silicon-Carbide (SiC) — Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect-Transistor (MOSFET) with gate boost circuit which is very simple and cost-effective. Compared to a conventional gate drive circuit, the proposed gate driver has capability of reducing the switching losses and switching time without increasing switching noise. SiC power devices have attracted huge interest as next generation power devices. Normally, switching losses and switching noise have some trade-off each other, SiC devices are expected to switch fast for low switching losses but fast switching might cause switching noise problem such as electromagnetic interferences (EMI). We have confirmed that the proposed gate driver makes it possible to drive SiC-MOSFET fast and energy efficiently without increasing switching noise and break the trade-off of switching characteristics.

We present a hypermedia-based conversation recording method to preserve informal artifacts which are obtained in a realtime collaboration. Informal artifacts are not final goals but important results such as a process of a decision, an individual opinion, a rejected idea, or a nuance. Conversation in a realtime collaborative session is recorded linked with a participant's handwritten scripts so that the relevant portion of the conversation can be selectively played back in the subsequent individual session. A participant can preserve informal artifacts and structure the decision-making process by playing back the conversation after the collaboration. The important feature is that a participant can insert meaningful cues in any portion of the conversation without disturbing the current way of collaboration. Through the use of a prototype, we have found the effectiveness and the further improvement of this method.

We present a toolkit and architecture for supporting networked shared (multi-user) hypermedia applications.The toolkit supports a rich set of media types: text, graphics, pictures, live and pre-recorded sound, and live and pre-recorded video.Hypermedia links can be anchored to any media type and refer to nodes which contain media items.Nodes provide for abstractions such as pages, cards and general information networks.Media information can be accessed and changed by several users.The toolkit is realised as a class library on a distributed object oriented language based on C. The concurrent and distributed features of the underlying architecture provide for multi-users.Issues of sharing, version management and access control are addressed by considering database extensions to the object oriented architecture.Support for networking of continuous media streams is provided by extensions to the underlying runtime system.The toolkit has been used to develop and support conference and groupware applications.

A document layout system based on automatic extraction of document architecture including logical and reference structures has been developed for reducing users' effort in document preparation, and has been implemented in a practical Japanese word processor. The extracted document architecture is used for both automatic text formatting and layout of text, figures and tables. Automatic text element recognition is performed by morphological analysis using keywords. Through intra-line (one sentence) and inter-line (relations between sentences) analysis, logical and reference structures are obtained. The automatic layout system effectively lays out the document using the extracted document architecture and knowledge about the layout.