KEIO SFC JOURNAL Vol.13 No.2 New Trends in Computing Systems

Semiconductor technology has been a critical engine driving progress for half a century, but faces fundamental problems that will slow its advance. One possible route to computers with new capabilities is quantum computation. At the Keio Shonan Fujisawa Campus, the AQUA research group is working toward the realization of such systems. In this article, we introduce the concepts of quantum computation, the range of problems that quantum computers can solve, and the challenges to realizing useful quantum computers.

In the multimedia system design and implementation, one of the most important issues is how to search and analyze media data (images, music, movies and documents), according to user's impressions and contexts. We have proposed "the Mathematical Model of Meaning (MMM)" and its application to "Kansei" and semantic associative search. The concept of "Kansei" includes several meanings on sensitive recognition, such as "emotion", "impression", "human senses", "feelings", "sensitivity", "psychological reaction" and "physiological reaction." This model realizes "Kansei" processing and semantic associative search for media data, according to user's impressions and contexts, and is applied to compute semantic correlations between keywords, images, music, movies and documents dynamically in a context-dependent way. The main feature of MMM is to realize semantic associative search in the 2000 dimensional orthogonal semantic space with semantic projection functions. This space is created for dynamically computing semantic equivalence or similarity between keywords and media data. As a global environmental system, we have also designed "5 Dimensional World Map System," as a multimedia semantic computing system for global environmental analysis. One of the important applications of this system is "Global Environment-Analysis," which aims to evaluate various influences caused by natural disasters in global environments. Our experimental results have shown the feasibility and effectiveness of our semantic associative computing system based on "MMM" in global environmental analysis.

Web search engine requires huge amounts of computing power, partly because of the size and growth of Web, but also because returning useful data out of entire Web is a challenging problem. Various large-scale infrastructure systems, like famous MapReduce and BigTable, have been developed at Google to scale and improve the search engine since almost its beginning. These nearly-10-year-old systems are still actively used and proving its scalability, but new systems that are based on completely different design assumptions from those of early days are also emerging. This paper picks up six infrastructure systems at Google, published from 2003 to 2012, and provide high-level technical overview of them.

In this paper, we describe the design of PC accelerator with FPGA for the purpose of delay reduction and power consumption. With the increase of cloud services, there are growing demands of the low-latency processing and the reduction of power consumption in the data center. PC accelerator enables these processing, however, there are various problems in the introduction of the PC accelerators for cloud services. We discuss the architecture, the performance and the adaptive area of PC accelerator with FPGA.

Biologists have been investigating general design and operating principles by reverse engineering the molecular machinery of biological systems. Here I illustrate how biologists have been convinced to consider life as molecular machinery first. Then, I discuss what kind of insights about the nature of life can be provided by computation on vast amounts of biological data, produced by innovative technologies such as high-throughput measurements and single-molecule microscopy.

This study is about Chinese policies towards the British Labour Party and the Japanese Socialist Party in the 1950s. While, it was very difficult for China to develop official relations with most governments of western countries under the glare of U.S disapproval after the Korean War, China tried to spread its influence by strengthening its relations with opposition parties in both Britain and Japan. Working with the opposition parties was one of China's strategies aimed at undermining the US's China policy in the 1950s. Pragmatism played a very important role in Chinese foreign policies in the 1950s.

This qualitative descriptive study attempted to understand the relationship of a recent graduate nurse's selection process for receivers, decision to self-disclose, and the effects of each in a hospital ward. The selected receivers comprised a preceptor, and a hospital ward divisional commander who directly instructed recent graduate nurses, among others. The process of encouraging self-disclosure included four steps as follows: (1) assessing ward atmosphere, (2) evaluating the person's degree of interest, (3) judging the reliability of the person, and (4) communicating thoughts and feelings. The results indicated that self-disclosure influenced motivation for the job.

Korea has received attention as an official donor since joining the Development Assistance Committee in 2010. Korea's assistance in developing nations began in the 1960s, undergoing transitions from establishing enforcement agencies, expanding the budget, and reorganizing systems. Based on the analysis of the Framework Act on International Development Cooperation-which was not realized even in Japan-this study determined the significance of enacting the fundamental law on Korea's international development cooperation policy. Specifically, the study focused on the internal and external pressures surrounding the International Development Cooperation Policy, analyzing the enactment while determining the fundamental law's enactment resolved domestic problems on aid policies and met international standards.

This paper gives another proof of an analog of Ostrowski-Kolchin theorem in difference algebra, which was proved by Hardouin. Let K be a field of characteristic 0 and (L, τ) a difference extension of a difference field (K, τ). Denote the invariant field of (L, τ) and that of (K, τ) by CL, C respectively. Suppose C is an algebraically closed field. Suppose x1, . . . , xm, y1, . . . , yn are nonzero elements of L satisfying τ (xi) = uixi,τ (yj) = yj + vj , where u1, . . . , um, v1, . . . , vn ∈ K. Then the analog states that if x1, . . . , xm, y1, . . . , yn are algebraically dependent over KCL, there exists a nonzero element a ∈ K satisfying τ(a) = (∏mi=1 uiki ) a for a nonzero element (ki) ∈Ζm or τ (a) = a +Σn j=1 aj vj for a nonzero element (aj) ∈ C n.