The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) was developed and provided to Global Change Observation Mission satellite (GCOM-W) [1][2] led by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). AMSR2 observes the global water and energy cycling, such as water vapor, precipitation, sea surface temperature, soil moisture, etc. AMSR2 mounted on the GCOM-W satellite was launched by H-IIA Rocket in 2012 as a successor of AMSR-E[3] on EOS-Aqua and AMSR on ADEOS-II[4]. In this paper, the evaluation result about High Temperature Noise Source (HTS) performance as one of calibrators on orbit and its future aspect are described.

This paper describes Akara 2010, the distributed shogi system that has defeated a professional shogi player in a public game for the first time in history. The system employs a novel design to build a high-performance computer shogi player for standard tournament conditions. The design enhances the performance of the entire system by means of distributed computing. To utilize a large number of computers, a majority-voting method using four existing programs is combined with a distributed-search method. Although the performance of the entire system could not be tested, the majority-voting component increased the winning percentage from 62% to 73%, and the distributed-search component increased it from 50% to 70% or more.

The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) was developed and provided to Global Change Observation Mission satellite (GCOM-W1) led by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). AMSR2 observes the global water and energy cycling, such as water vapor, precipitation, sea surface temperature, soil moisture, etc. AMSR2 mounted on GCOM-W1 will be launched by H-IIA Rocket in winter period of FY2011. AMSR2 is now under the spacecraft protoflight test. This paper describes the development and evaluation result of High Temperature Noise Source (HTS), a calibration warm load of AMSR2.

In recent years, high bit-depth (HBD) images with 10 [bits/channel] or more are being used more often for their improved image quality. However, the size of HBD images become large and so more effective encoding techniques are needed. This paper considers the bit-depth transform process from the view point of minimizing bit-depth transform error. The minimization method is designed according to an optimum quantization algorithm. As a result, our method can improve the coding efficiency by an average of 11 [%] compared to the conventional method with AVC/H.264.

This paper proposes a multiple-divide technique using by-2, by-3, and by-4 frequency dividers to realize a lower phase-noise LC-VCO, and explores the design space of low-phase-noise VCO using the multiple-divide technique. In the simulated results using 90-nm CMOS model parameters, the optimum frequency range, achieving better than −191 dBc/Hz of FoM, can be extended from 6–12 GHz to 1.5–12 GHz.

GridFTP has been used as a data transfer protocol to effectively transfer a large volume of data in grid computing. GridFTP supports a feature called parallel data transfer that improves throughput by establishing multiple TCP connections in parallel. However, for achieving high GridFTP throughput, the number of TCP connections should be optimized based on the network status. In this paper, we propose an automatic parallelism tuning mechanism called GridFTP-APT (GridFTP with automatic parallelism tuning) that adjusts the number of parallel TCP connections only using information measurable in the grid middleware. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate that GridFTP-APT significantly improves the performance of GridFTP in various network environments.

Compound nouns consisting of a sequence of nominals are easily composed and used very often in Japanese documents. While this feature gives an expressive power to the language, it is a big problem in machine translation systems. We offer a method to rewrite the Japanese compound nouns into their equivalent expressions so that machine translation systems may use them as substitutes for the original compound nouns. An experiment of using the rewritten expressions in a machine translation system shows that our effort helps improve its performance considerably.

This paper describes a writer's aid system that helps the Japanese write sound English sentences. Our system takes as input a Japanese writing and its English translation produced by a commercial machine translation system. It then extracts, from the Internet Corpus, English sentences and expressions usable for correcting and/or polishing the translation to suit our specific purpose. An experiment for writing correspondences in conferences and others shows that the system is easy to use and improves the writings by machines or humans considerably in effort, style, and content.

It is important to accurately evaluate and reduce jitter accumulation in long-haul digital repeatered lines. Jitter accumulation caused by random pattern signals has already been analyzed. However, periodic pattern signals such as pseudorandom signals are usually used to measure jitter accumulation. This paper describes the difference between the jitter accumulation for both signals and the necessary conditions to accurately estimate jitter accumulation for random pattern signals by using periodic pattern signals. First, it is shown theoretically that systematic jitter for periodic signals saturates, showing a ripple pattern. The limit of increase is determined by the ratio of tank bandwidth and pattern repetition frequency. Up to a certain number of regenerators determined by the ratio, systematic jitter increases in rough proportion to the\sqrt{N}slope. It is also shown that the equation to estimate random pattern jitter accumulation is determined by the measured value for periodic pattern signals. Second, jitter characteristics are simulated by optical signal circulating experiments. The results are in agreement with the analysis. In addition, the reduction effects on periodic signal jitter accumulation caused by timing signal delay and nonlinearity of the limiter in the timing circuit are shown.

This paper describes the FS-4OOM submarine system which has a total system capacity of 17 280 two-way voice channels. It gives the major system parameters and system design. In addition, it discusses transmission characteristics of the system including the results of a longterm stability test carried out from January 1982 to February 1984 in Sagami Bay, in the Yahatano Sea area off the coast of the Izu Peninsula.

This paper describes a new line code which is suitable for a high-speed optical digital transmission system of more than 400 Mbits/s. This line code, namedmB1Ccode, is created by means of a complemental pulse which is inserted everymbits. This complemental pulse prevents long series of "l"'s or "0"'s. Power spectrum, jitter, and optical transmission characteristics as well as error monitoring performance are described on theoretical analyses and experimental results.

An evaluation of the influence of mode partition noise on error rate performance in a high bit rate optical fiber transmission system is presented. First, it is experimentally clarified that the intensity in each longitudinal mode of a laser diode fluctuates, although the intensity for the total mode is constant. It is also established that this fluctuation causes degradation of the error rate performance after transmission through a long optical fiber. The fluctuation is named "mode partition noise." Next a simple model for the fluctuation is proposed. The characteristics of the fluctuation are discussed on the basis of this model. Optical waveform fluctuation is found to be introduced by mode partition noise in the course of transmission through a long despersive transmission medium. This optical waveform fluctuation and its frequency spectrum are calculated. Finally, the error rate performance is evaluated and specifications required for a laser spectrum to attain a given repeater spacing are clarified.