• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.47
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• pp.129-156
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• 2010

Since the 1970s, international construction employers have commonly requested first demand guarantees upon their contractors as a form of security for due performance of their works. Contractors prefer the greater protection offered by more traditional forms of security requiring presentation of an arbitral award or other evidence of the caller's entitlement to compensation. Many contractors nonetheless feel that they have no alternative but to provide these unconditional guarantees in order to compete. However, these unconditional first demand guarantees are controversial and have given rise to numerous disputes both in arbitration and litigation. Disputes arising from first demand guarantees can be broken down into a) applications to prevent a perceived fraudulent or otherwise unfair or improper calling of a guarantee, b) claims arising from such abusive calls and c) claims relating to the consequences of such calls even if the call itself may not be abusive as such. The contractors should carefully assess the risk of an abusive call being made bearing in mind the difficulties he may face in seeking to prevent such a call. He should also bear in mind the difficulties, delays and cost he is likely to encounter in seeking to recover any monies wrongfully called. One option would be to provide that the call can only be made once and to the extent that the employer's damages have been assessed or even incurred or even for the default to have been established by an arbitral tribunal or court. Another option would be to provide that any call be accompanied by a decision of a competent and impartial third party stating that the contractor is in breach. For example, such a requirement could be incorporated into a construction contract based on the FIDIC Conditions by submitting this decision to a Dispute Adjudication Board. Another option would be to provide for the "ICC Counter-Guarantee Scheme". In sum, there would appear to be room for compromise between the employer and the contractor in respect of first demand guarantees by conditioning the entitlement to call such guarantees to the determination of a competent and impartial third party.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.13-21
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• 2005

This paper presents a fuzzy model-based approach for synchronization of time-delay chaotic system with input saturation. Time-delay chaotic drive and response system is respectively represented by Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model. Specially, the response system contains input saturation. Using the unidirectional linear error feedback and the parallel distributed compensation (PDC) scheme, we design fuzzy chaotic synchronization system and analyze local stability for synchronization error dynamics. Since time-delay in the transmission channel always exists, we also take it into consideration. The sufficient condition for the local stability of the fuzzy synchronization system with input saturation and time-delay is derived by applying Lyapunov-Krasovskii theory and solving linear matrix inequalities (LMI's) problem. A numerical example is given to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.25-34
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• 2008

By comparing two images, which are captured with the same scene at different time, we can detect a set of outliers, such as occluding objects due to moving vehicles. To reduce the influence from the different intensity properties of the images, an intensity compensation scheme, which is based on the polynomial regression model, is employed. For an accurate detection of outliers alleviating the influence from a set of outliers, a simple technique that reruns the regression is employed. In this paper, an algorithm that iteratively reruns the regression is theoretically analyzed by observing the convergence property of the estimates of the noise variance. Using a correction constant for the estimate of the noise variance is proposed. The correction enables the detection algorithm robust to the choice of thresholds for selecting outliers. Numerical analysis using both synthetic and Teal images are also shown in this paper to show the robust performance of the detection algorithm.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Illuminating and Electrical Installation Engineers
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.48-56
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• 2012

The object of this paper is the controller for supplying stably power in a separate house in which a hybrid electrical storage system with a stand-alone photovoltaic/wind power generation system and a small generator is applied. In the photovoltaic/wind hybrid power system used in the separate house, when only the battery is used in sunless days, the capacity of the battery is become larger. In particular, as in recent days, if cloudy days are frequent due to anomaly climate, it is difficult to estimate the number of sunless days. Accordingly, it is preferable to build the electrical storage system that numbers of sunshineless days are to be controlled and a shortage amount of the power generation capacity is to be handled by a small generator system. In order to supply stably power of new renewable energy such as solar to any separate houses, it is preferable to reduce the capacity of battery by decreasing the number of sunless days when estimating the capacity of battery and to drive the small generator for compensation of the power shortage. Such system needs components including inverters for photovoltaic and wind power generation system, batteries and controllers for automatically driving the small generator, based upon the nature of the stand-alone house, and it is preferable to use the controller having a simpler and higher stability by adopting the all-in-one scheme to facilitate its maintenance.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1686-1694
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• 2014

In this paper, a new scheme to recognize a finger shape in the depth image captured by Kinect is proposed. Rigid transformation of an input finger shape is pre-processed for its robustness against the shape angle of input fingers. After extracting contour map from hand region, observing the change of contour pixel location is performed to calculate rotational compensation angle. For the finger shape recognition, we first acquire three pixel points, the most left, right, and top located pixel points. In the proposed algorithm, we first acquire three pixel points, the most left, right, and top located pixel points for the finger shape recognition, also we use geometrical features of human fingers such as Euclidean distance, the angle of the finger and the pixel area of hand region between each pixel points to recognize the finger shape. Through experimental results, we show that the proposed algorithm performs better than old schemes.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.155-183
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• 2012

Means-Ends Network model was used to identify factors of means objective(means supplied by vendor) and fundamental objectives(purchasing motivations) for purchasing decision-making structure and dimensions of customer values on purchasers of internet shopping mall in Korea and China. In Means-Ends Network 6 factors(shopping travel, shipping assurance, vendor trust, online payment, product choice, and recommender systems) were found as a means objectives and 3 factors(shopping convenience, internet environment, customer support) as a fundamental objectives of shopping. However the results of hypotheses test for Means-Ends Network show some important differences between two countries. Something important to notice here is that Chinese customers shopping in China recognize shipping assurance factor and vendor trust factor as important factors satisfying all fundamental objectives unlike as in the case of our country. As these two factors are attribution factors responsible to the sellers, it is identified that customers do not trust the sellers and sellers have not met the expectations of customers. Therefore, these results show that the seller efforts assuring the reliability of the seller themselves, such as conducting its own compensation scheme are more important rather than the establishment of the guarantee institution to guarantee reliability and delivery assurance of sellers and implementation of legal and institutional apparatus such as the settlement of e-commerce licence system. Though this study presents such an important marketing implications, it can be pointed out that the limits are this research was done on the general Internet shopping malls without considering the Internet shopping mall types of diversity, the survey was designed around the student samples for convenience of the investigation because it was an international survey and the collected data has been limited to the western coast cities, such as China's Beijing, Shanghai, and Dalian.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.43 no.12 s.354
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• pp.61-67
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• 2006

This paper proposes the algorithm for tracking of the residual phase errors incurred by carrier frequency offset and sampling frequency offset in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems which are suitable for high data rate wireless communications. In the OFDM systems the subcarriers which are orthogonal to each other are modulated by digital data and transmitted simultaneously. The carrier frequency offset causes degradation of signal to noise ratio(SNR) performance and interference between the adjacent subcarriers. The errors in the sampling timing caused by the sampling frequency difference between the transmitter and the receiver sides also cause a major performance degradation in the OFDM systems. The residual error tracking and compensation mechanism is essential in the OFDM system since the carrier and the sampling frequency offset cause the loss of orthogonality resulting in the system performance loss. This paper proposes the scheme where the channel gain and the payload data information are reflected in the residual error tracking process which results in the reduction of the estimation error and the tracking performance improvements under the frequency selective fading wireless channels.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.1C
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• pp.65-76
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• 2010

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an attractive technique for achieving high-bit-rate wireless data transmission. However, multicarrier systems such as OFDM show great sensitivity to nonlinear distortion. The OFDM structure requires a summation of a large number of subcarriers for multicarrier modulation, and as a result of this summation large signal envelope fluctuations occur. These fluctuations make OFDM systems to be very sensitive to nonlinear distortion introduced by the high power amplifier (HPA) at the transmitter. In this paper, we propose a canonical piecewise-linear (CPWL) model based digital predistorter to compensate for nonlinear distortion introduced by the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and the HPA in OFDM systems. The performance of the new predistortion scheme for OFDM systems is evaluated in terms of total degradation (TD) and bit error rate (BER). The simulation results demonstrated that the proposed predistorter achieves significant performance improvement by effectively compensating for the nonlinear distortion introduced by the HPA.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.2131-2139
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• 2014

In this paper, a binary-coded physical-layer network coding (PNC) is considered when high-order modulation techniques are used at source nodes in wireless communication environments. In the conventional PNC schemes, tight power control and phase compensation are required at a relay node. However, they may not be feasible in practical wireless communication environments. Thus, we do not assume the pre-equalization in this paper, and we only utilize the channel state information at receiver (CSIR). We propose a signal detection method for the binary-coded PNC with high-order modulation, such as QPSK and 16QAM, at the source nodes, while the conventional scheme only consider the BPSK at source nodes. We also analyze the bit-error performance of the proposed technique in both uncoded and coded cases.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.1861-1868
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• 2014

In wireless communication systems, a frequency offset exist at the received signal due to the transmitter-receiver oscillator mismatch and Doppler effect in mobile environments. Those offsets rotate the received signal's phase and degrade the receiver performance. Hence, estimation and compensation of the frequency offset is crucial at the receiver. This paper proposes a new frequency offset estimation technique based on partial correlation. The proposed method requires less computational complexity than that of the conventional method. In addition, since the proposed one can estimate a wide range of frequency offset without estimation accuracy loss, the application of the method is desirable for the communication environments that have a large frequency offset. In order to verify the performance of our proposed scheme, a series of computer simulations have been carried out and compared against those of the conventional method.