Off-chip latency-driven dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for an MPEG decoding
This paper describes a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique for MPEG decoding to reduce the energy consumption using the computational workload decomposition. This technique decomposes the workload for decoding a frame into on-chip and off-chip workloads. The execution time required for the on-chip workload is CPU frequency-dependent, whereas the off-chip workload execution time does not change, regardless of the CPU frequency, resulting in the maximum energy savings by setting the minimum frequency during off-chip workload execution time, without causing any delay penalty. This workload decomposition is performed using a performance-monitoring unit (PMU) in the XScale-processor, which provides various statistics such as cache hit/miss and CPU stall, due to data dependency at run time. The on-chip workload for an incoming frame is predicted using a frame-based history so that the processor voltage and frequency can be scaled to provide the exact amount of computing power needed to decode the frame. To guarantee a quality of service (QoS) constraint, a prediction error compensation method, called inter-frame compensation, is proposed in which the on-chip workload prediction error is diffused into subsequent frames such that run time frame rates change smoothly. The proposed DVFS algorithm has been implemented on an XScale-based Testbed. Detailed current measurements on this platform demonstrate significant CPU energy savings ranging from 50% to 80% depending on the video clip.

title: Energy-Aware Wireless Video Streaming
abstract: This paper presents a dynamic energy management policy for a wireless video streaming system, consisting of battery-powered client and server. The paper starts from the observation that the video quality in wireless streaming is a function of three factors: encoding aptitude of the server, decoding aptitude of the client, and the wireless channel. Based on this observation, the energy consumption of a wireless video streaming system is modeled and analyzed. Using the proposed model, the optimal energy assignment to each video frame is done such that the maximum system lifetime is achieved while satisfying a given minimum video quality requirement. Experimental results show that the proposed policy increases the system lifetime by 20%.

title: Energy-Aware MPEG-4 FGS Streaming
abstract: In this paper, we propose an energy-aware MPEG-4 FGS video streaming system with client feedback. In this client-server system, the battery-powered mobile client sends its maximum decoding capability (i.e., its decoding aptitude) to the server in order to help the server determine the additional amount of data (in the form of enhancement layers on top of the base layer) per frame that it sends to the client, and thereby, set its data rate. On the client side, a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling technique is used to adjust the decoding aptitude of the client while meeting a constraint on the minimum achieved video quality. As a measure of energy efficiency of the video streamer, the notion of a normalized decoding load is introduced. It is shown that a video streaming system that maintains this normalized load at unity produces the optimum video quality with no energy waste. We implemented an MPEG-4 FGS video streaming system on an XScale-based testbed in which a server and a mobile client are wirelessly connected by a feedback channel. Based on the actual current measurements in this testbed, we obtain an average of 20% communication energy reduction in the client by making the MPEG-4 FGS streamer energy-aware.

title: Determining the specificity of terms using inside-outside information: a necessary condition of term hierarchy mining
abstract: This paper introduces new specificity measuring methods of terms using inside and outside information. Specificity of a term is the quantity of domain specific information contained in the term. Specific terms have a larger quantity of domain information than general terms. Specificity is an important necessary condition for building hierarchical relations among terms. If t1 is a hyponym of t2 in a domain term hierarchy, then the specificity of t1 is greater than that of t2. As domain specific terms are commonly compounds of the generic level term and some modifiers, inside information is important to represent the meaning of terms. Outside contextual information is also used to complement the shortcomings of inside information. We propose an information theoretic method to measure the quantity of terms. Experiments showed promising results with a precision of 73.9% when applied to terms in the MeSH thesaurus.

title: Effective foreign word extraction for Korean information retrieval
abstract: In Korean text, foreign words, which are mostly transliterations of English words, are frequently used. Foreign words are usually very important index terms in Korean information retrieval since most of them are technical terms or names. So accurate foreign word extraction is crucial for high performance of information retrieval. However, accurate foreign word extraction is not easy because it inevitably accompanies word segmentation and most of the foreign words are unknown. In this paper, we present an effective foreign word recognition and extraction method. In order to accurately extract foreign words, we developed an effective method of word segmentation that involves unknown foreign words. Our word segmentation method effectively utilizes both unknown word information acquired through the automatic dictionary compilation and foreign word recognition information. Our HMM-based foreign word recognition method does not require large labeled examples for the model training unlike the previously proposed method.

title: Research problems in clothing simulation
abstract: Clothing simulation and animation are of great importance in computer animation. If cloth simulations could be improved to the point that they could generate realistic cloth motion in real-time, they would find uses in many aspects of daily life such as in fashion design and manufacturing. The area of cloth simulation and animation is full of technical challenges: creating more realistic results, achieving faster run-times, and developing methods capable of constructing and simulating more complex garments. This paper provides an overview of the key procedures involved in the creation of clothed characters, describes the current state-of-the-art techniques, and proposes the research problems that most require further study. Three technical aspects of cloth simulation are considered in this paper: garment construction, physically based simulation, and collision resolution.

title: System level power-performance trade-offs in embedded systems using voltage and frequency scaling of off-chip buses and memory
abstract: In embedded systems, off-chip buses and memory (i.e., L2 memory as opposed to the L1 memory which is usually on-chip cache) consume significant power often more than the processor itself. In this paper for the case of an embedded system with one processor chip and one memory chip, we propose frequency and voltage scaling of the off-chip buses and the memory chip and use a known micro-architectural enhancement called a store buffer to reduce the resulting impact on execution time. Our benchmarks show a system (processor + off-chip bus + off-chip memory) power savings of 28% to 36%, an energy savings of 13% to 35%, all while increasing the execution time in the range of 1% to 29%. Previous work in power-aware computing has focused on frequency and voltage scaling of the processors or selective power-down of sub-sets of off-chip memory chips. This paper quantitatively explores voltage/frequency scaling of off-chip buses and memory as a means of trading off performance for power/energy at the system level in embedded systems.

title: PA-ZSA (Power-Aware Zero-Slack Algorithm): A Graph-Based Timing Analysis for Ultra-Low Power CMOS VLSI
abstract: This paper describes a slack budget distribution algorithm for ultra-low power CMOS logic circuits in a VLSI design environment. We introduce Power-Aware Zero-Slack Algorithm (PA-ZSA), which distributes the surplus time slacks into the most power-hungry modules. The PA-ZSA ensures that the total slack budget is near-maximal and the total power is minimal as a power-aware version of the well-known zero-slack algorithm (ZSA). Based on these time slacks, we have conducted the low-power optimization at gate level by using technology scaling technique. The experimental results show that our strategy reduces average 36% of the total (static and dynamic) power over the conventional slack budget distribution algorithms.