How to teach a van to drive: an undergraduate perspective on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge

This paper describes how a team of undergraduate volunteers from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) developed a robotic vehicle that can navigate completely autonomously through the Mojave Desert. Called Alice, the vehicle was Caltech's entry to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge which aimed to generate the technology needed to build and program an unmanned ground vehicle through 130 miles of difficult terrain completely autonomously in under ten hours. Although Alice failed to win the competition, she did succeed in her original purpose of teaching a new generation of students about engineering, how to apply theory to the real world, how to debug and deal with shortcomings and schedules, and most importantly, how to work as a team on a complex problem

Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering

Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science, engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie

Iowa Engineer, Volume 2016, No. 2

https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowaengineer/1048/thumbnail.jp

Optimization for software release and crash

Software testing is a process to detect faults in the completeness and quality of developed computer software. Testing is a key process in assuring quality by identifying defects in software, and possibly fixing them, before it is delivered to end-users. A major decision to make during this software testing is, to determine whether to continue testing and eventually releasing the software, or when to stop the test and ‘crash’ it. Such a decision needs to be made to optimally balance the tradeoff between the cost of development and the reliability of the software. In this paper, a new optimal strategy is developed based on a conditional non-homogeneous Poisson process (Conditional-NHPP) on a continuous time horizon to determine when the optimal time is to release or crash the software

Industry/University Collaboration at the University of Michigan-Dearborn: A Focus on Relevant Technology

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154104/1/kampfner1996.pd