Multi-hop relay channels use multiple relay stages, each with multiple relay nodes, to facilitate communication between a source and destination. Previously, distributed space-time coding was used to maximize diversity gain. Assuming a low-rate feedback link from the destination to each relay stage and the source, this paper proposes end-to-end antenna selection strategies as an alternative to ...

Layout camouflaging (LC) is a promising technique to protect chip design intellectual property (IP) from reverse engineers. Most prior art, however, cannot leverage the full potential of LC due to excessive overheads and/or their limited scope on an FEOL-centric and accordingly customized manufacturing process. If at all, most existing techniques can be reasonably applied only to selected parts...

Open domain question answering is slowly broadening its horizons, expanding from simple factoid questions to encompass broader and more complex queries. Recent areas of interest include scenario-based question answering, incorporating existing domain knowledge during question analysis, various types of inference, and intelligently processing subquestions. FLOOD (standing for Fluent, Linguistic,...

NASA is interested in using commercial satellites to provide broadband communications support for the International Space Station and other space missions. We describe a large-scale simulation model that we plan to use for detailed performance studies of critical parameters such as QoS guarantees for specific services, traffic routing schemes, transport protocol support, dynamic bandwidth alloc...

Virtualization provides several benefits to users in the datacenter in terms of infrastructure cost savings (e.g., capital, power, space, cooling, labor). Examples include highly efficient and available resource, networking, and storage management. As many workloads have moved to virtualized environments, it is critical that vSphere handles scale and performs optimally. However, there are scena...

Internet routing is at an important crossroad. The current global routing table, which is largely based on IPv4 addresses, has been growing at an alarming rate over the last few years, despite the constraints by the shortage of IPv4 addresses. IPv6 removes the address shortage problem, however its deployment may potentially further exacerbate the routing scalability challenges facing us today. ...

Unique challenges are present when one tries to build distributed real-time applications using standard o -the-shelf systems which are in common use but are not necessarily designed speci cally for real-time systems. In particular, to realize end-to-end predictability when, say, a process on one node sends data to a process on another node, several issues must be addressed: (1) mapping applicat...

Non-prehensile manipulation, such as pushing, is an important function for robots to move objects and is sometimes preferred as an alternative to grasping. However, due to unknown frictional forces, pushing has been proven a difficult task for robots. We explore the use of reinforcement learning to train a robot to robustly push an object. In order to deal with the sample complexity of training...

With an increasing number of services and devices interacting in a decentralized manner, choreographies are an active area of investigation. The heterogeneous nature of interacting systems leads to choreographies that may not only include conventional services, but also sensor-actuator networks, databases and service feeds. Their middleware behavior within choreographies is captured through abs...

The present paper investigates an intuitive way of robot path planning, called robot teaching by demonstration. In this method, an operator holds the robot end-effector and moves it through a number of positions and orientations in order to teach it a desired task. The presented control architecture applies impedance control in such a way that the end-effector follows the operator’s hand with d...