Iterative Turbo Channel Estimation for OFDM System over Rapid Dispersive Fading Channel
Coherent OFDM detection requires accurate channel state information (CSI). Mobile radio channels are both time and frequency dispersive, especially at high vehicular speeds, which makes channel estimation a challenging problem in system design. Conventional preamble-based and pilot-aided channel estimation require numerous reference signals, which significantly compromises the system throughput. This paper proposes a novel low complexity iterative turbo channel estimation technique which makes use of preamble, pilots and soft decoded data information in an iterative fashion to improve the system performance over the time and frequency selective fading channel while maintaining the system throughput. The numerical and analytical results show that the proposed technique can approach the performance of systems with perfect CSI with much fewer preamble and pilots symbols compared to existing channel estimation methods.

title: MIMO Broadcast Transmission Strategy over Fast Time-Varying Channels
abstract: In time-varying channels, the channel state information available at the transmitter (CSIT) is outdated due to inherent time delay between the uplink channel estimation and the downlink data transmission in TDD systems. In this letter, we propose an iterative precoding method and a linear decoding method which are both based on minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) criteria to mitigate the interference among data streams and users created by outdated CSIT for multiuser MIMO downlink systems. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the impairment of the outdated CSIT and improve the system capacity.

title: Relaying Schemes for MIMO Broadcast Channels: Coexistence of Direct-Link and Relay-Link Users
abstract: The combination of relay and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques can significantly benefit the signal transmission in cellular networks. In this work, we propose a novel relaying scheme for the relay assisted MIMO broadcast channel including user classification and precoding. The users are firstly classified as Direct Link (DL) users and Relay Link (RL) users according to their channel conditions. After classification, both DL and RL users may coexist in the system, and Zero-Forcing (ZF) precoding is employed at both the BS and the relay for interference cancellation. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed relaying scheme can effectively combat the large scale fading of the channels and provide significant performance gain compared with the conventional MIMO relaying schemes without user classification.

title: A Novel Evaluation Method for the Downlink Capacity of Distributed Antenna Systems
abstract: This letter focuses on the simplified capacity evaluation for the downlink of a distributed antenna system (DAS) with random antenna layout. Based on system scale-up, we derive a good approximation of the downlink capacity by developing the results from random matrix theory. We also propose an iterative method to calculate the unknown parameters in the approximated expression of the downlink capacity. The approximation is illustrated to be quite accurate and the iterative method is shown to be quite efficient by Monte Carlo simulations.

title: The Impacts of Radio Channels and Node Mobility on Link Statistics in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
abstract: Understanding link statistics in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is essential to design adaptive routing protocols and achieve desired network performance. While much attention has been given to the node mobility impacts, little has been done to investigate the influence of dynamic channel fadings and the joint effects of the interactions among radio channels, transmission range, node mobility and node-pair distance on link statistics. In this paper, we investigate the link stability and availability by using a distance transition probability matrix of a relative distance between two nodes. Our analysis takes the node effective transmission range Re into account. The relative node movement is based on the Semi-Markov Smooth (SMS) mobility model  which captures the smooth node speed (V) transition and the radio channel variations in a small time- scale. We show that the PDF of link lifetime in MANETs can be effectively approximated by the exponential distribution characterized by the parameter V/Re. Moreover, we And that the impacting factors on residual link lifetime are in the decreasing order of node speed, transmission range, node-pair distance. The analytical results are validated by extensive simulations.

title: Capacity bound of mimo systems with mpsk modulation and superimposed pilots
abstract: The enormous capacity potential of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is based on some unrealistic assumptions, such as the complete channel state information (CCSI) at the receiver and Gaussian distributed data. In this paper, in frequency-flat Rayleigh fading environment, we investigate the ergodic capacity of MIMO systems with M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) modulation and superimposed pilots for channel estimation. With linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimation, the optimal pilots design is presented. For the mathematical tractability, we also derive an easy-computing closed-form lower bound of the channel capacity. Furthermore, the optimal power allocation between the data and pilots is investigated by numerical optimization. It is shown that more power should be devoted to the data in low SNR environments and to the pilots in high SNR environments.

title: Tour the world: Building a web-scale landmark recognition engine
abstract: Modeling and recognizing landmarks at world-scale is a useful yet challenging task. There exists no readily available list of worldwide landmarks. Obtaining reliable visual models for each landmark can also pose problems, and efficiency is another challenge for such a large scale system. This paper leverages the vast amount of multimedia data on the Web, the availability of an Internet image search engine, and advances in object recognition and clustering techniques, to address these issues. First, a comprehensive list of landmarks is mined from two sources: (1) ~20 million GPS-tagged photos and (2) online tour guide Web pages. Candidate images for each landmark are then obtained from photo sharing Websites or by querying an image search engine. Second, landmark visual models are built by pruning candidate images using efficient image matching and unsupervised clustering techniques. Finally, the landmarks and their visual models are validated by checking authorship of their member images. The resulting landmark recognition engine incorporates 5312 landmarks from 1259 cities in 144 countries. The experiments demonstrate that the engine can deliver satisfactory recognition performance with high efficiency.

title: Subspace analysis and optimization for AAM based face alignment
abstract: Active appearance models (AAM) is very powerful for extracting objects, e.g. faces, from images. It is composed of two parts: the AAM subspace model and the AAM search. While these two parts are closely correlated, existing efforts treated them separately and had not considered how to optimize them overall. In this paper, an approach is proposed to optimize the subspace model while considering the search procedure. We first perform a subspace error analysis, and then to minimize the AAM error we propose an approach which optimizes the subspace model according to the search procedure. For the subspace error analysis, we decomposed the subspace error into two parts, which are introduced by the subspace model and the search procedure respectively. This decomposition shows that the optimal results of AAM can be achieved only by optimizing both of them jointly rather than separately. Furthermore, based on this error decomposition, we develop a method to find the optimal subspace model according to the search procedure by considering both the two decomposed errors. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can find the optimal AAM subspace model rapidly and improve the performance of AAM significantly.

title: Cooperative Autonomic Management in Dynamic Distributed Systems
abstract: The centralized management of large distributed systems is often impractical, particularly when the both the topology and status of the system change dynamically. This paper proposes an approach to application-centric self-management in large distributed systems consisting of a collection of autonomic components that join and leave the system dynamically. Cooperative autonomic components self-organize into a dynamically created overlay network. Through local information sharing with neighbors, each component gains access to global information as needed for optimizing performance of applications. The approach has been validated and evaluated by developing a decentralized autonomic system consisting of multiple autonomic application managers previously developed for the In-VIGO grid-computing system. Using analytical results from complex random network and measurements done in a prototype system, we demonstrate the robustness, self-organization and adaptability of our approach, both theoretically and experimentally.

title: Multi-faceted contextual model for person identification in news video
abstract: Person identification is very important in the domain of multimedia news as it is often the focus of events in news stories and interest of searchers. However, this detection is impeded by the imprecise audio/visual analysis tools. In this paper, we describe a multimodal and multi-faceted approach to person-x detection in news video. We make use of multimodal features extracted from text, visual and audio inherent in news video. We also incorporate multiple external sources of news from Web and parallel news archives to extract location and temporal profile of the persons. We call this second source of information the multi-faceted context. The multimodal, multi-faceted information is then fused using a rank boosting approach. Experiments on TRECVID 2003 and 2004 search queries demonstrate that our approach is effective

title: Application-Tailored Cache Consistency for Wide-Area File Systems
abstract: The inability to perform optimizations based on application-specific information presents a hurdle to the deployment of pervasive LAN file systems across WAN environments. This paper proposes a novel approach addressing this problem through application-tailored caching and consistency in widearea file systems. It leverages widely available Network File System (NFS) deployments without any modifications to kernels nor applications, and employs middleware to dynamically establish Grid-wide Virtual File System (GVFS) sessions with application-tailored cache consistency. Two consistency models are discussed in this paper: a relaxed model based on invalidation polling, and a stronger model based on delegation and callback. Experimental evaluation based on microbenchmarks and scientific applications show that with application-tailored cache consistency, GVFS is able to both improve application runtimes and reduce server load significantly, compared to kernel-level NFS in WAN.