An autonomous decentralized system and a series of methods for reducing the detection time of path failures in the system are developed. Computing devices in the proposed system are organized into at least three groups based on their connectivity of system's graph model. Each computing device is assigned three identification values associated with their group memberships. The identification values are stored in a router connected to the communications network. Heartbeat packets are sent from the computing devices to the router periodically. If the router fails to receive a heartbeat packet from a computing device, a failed communication path from the router to the computing device is determined based on the three identification values.

The concentration estimation for multiple kinds of odors is regarded first as multiple two-class classification and then as multiple approximation problems, and solved by multiple single-output multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) lined up in two parallel rows. A pair of MLPs in cascade is on behalf of a specified odor. n pairs of MLPs represent n kinds of odors, one for one. An MLP in the first row separates its represented odor from the others. Because the two-class training subsets are often unbalanced, the samples from the minority sides are virtually reinforced. The generalization of an MLP is limited in local regions with respect to the distribution of the represented odor. An MLP in the second row approximates the relationship between the responses of the sensor array and the concentrations of the represented odor. A sample is assigned to a kind of odor by the MLP with the maximum output in the first row, and then its concentration is estimated by another MLP in the corresponding pair. The effectiveness of the proposed MLP models is verified by the experiments for 4 kinds of fragrant materials as well as their extended dataset.

The early study of fault tolerance in efficient sorting networks only achieved single-fault tolerance. By eliminating critical comparators, L. Rudolph (1985) presented a 1-fault tolerant design of the balanced sorting network (BSN) at the cost of one redundant stage of N/2 comparators and two permuters external to the network. In this paper, we show, however, that 1-fault tolerance of BSN can be achieved without introducing redundancy and external permuters. Furthermore, we provide solutions to the open question of how to achieve multiple-fault tolerance in BSN. We analyze the problem from a higher-level by introducing a new concept of critical stages, and find that all stages in previous designs are critical. A 2-fault tolerant design of BSN is then discovered after eliminating its critical stages. The new design has a similar network architecture (i.e., a multistage network with the output recirculated back to the input) and the same hardware cost as Rudolph's, but it has many distinguished features. The performance analysis shows that the new designs achieve much higher probabilities of correct sorting in the presence of faulty comparators than the previous reported designs.>

A planning system for recognizing connected letters belonging to the set [E1 = (P,T,K,B,D,V,E,G,C,3) ] is described. Experimental results related to ten (five male and five female) speakers are reported.