Automated data reduction workflows for astronomy

Data from complex modern astronomical instruments often consist of a large number of different science and calibration files, and their reduction requires a variety of software tools. The execution chain of the tools represents a complex workflow that needs to be tuned and supervised, often by individual researchers that are not necessarily experts for any specific instrument. The efficiency of data reduction can be improved by using automatic workflows to organise data and execute the sequence of data reduction steps. To realize such efficiency gains, we designed a system that allows intuitive representation, execution and modification of the data reduction workflow, and has facilities for inspection and interaction with the data. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has developed Reflex, an environment to automate data reduction workflows. Reflex is implemented as a package of customized components for the Kepler workflow engine. Kepler provides the graphical user interface to create an executable flowchart-like representation of the data reduction process. Key features of Reflex are a rule-based data organiser, infrastructure to re-use results, thorough book-keeping, data progeny tracking, interactive user interfaces, and a novel concept to exploit information created during data organisation for the workflow execution. Reflex includes novel concepts to increase the efficiency of astronomical data processing. While Reflex is a specific implementation of astronomical scientific workflows within the Kepler workflow engine, the overall design choices and methods can also be applied to other environments for running automated science workflows.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Sketching sonic interactions by imitation-driven sound synthesis

Sketching is at the core of every design activity. In visual design, pencil and paper are the preferred tools to produce sketches for their simplicity and immediacy. Analogue tools for sonic sketching do not exist yet, although voice and gesture are embodied abilities commonly exploited to communicate sound concepts. The EU project SkAT-VG aims to support vocal sketching with computeraided technologies that can be easily accessed, understood and controlled through vocal and gestural imitations. This imitation-driven sound synthesis approach is meant to overcome the ephemerality and timbral limitations of human voice and gesture, allowing to produce more refined sonic sketches and to think about sound in a more designerly way. This paper presents two main outcomes of the project: The Sound Design Toolkit, a palette of basic sound synthesis models grounded on ecological perception and physical description of sound-producing phenomena, and SkAT-Studio, a visual framework based on sound design workflows organized in stages of input, analysis, mapping, synthesis, and output. The integration of these two software packages provides an environment in which sound designers can go from concepts, through exploration and mocking-up, to prototyping in sonic interaction design, taking advantage of all the possibilities of- fered by vocal and gestural imitations in every step of the process

Traffic engineering eye diagram

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words - this statement also applies to networking topics. Thus, to effectively monitor network performance we need tools which present the performance metrics in a graphical way which is also clear and informative. We propose a tool for this purpose which we call the traffic engineering eye diagram (TEED). Eye diagrams are used in digital communications to analyse the quality of a digital signal; the TEED can similarly he used in the traffic engineering field to analyse the load balancing ability of a TE algorithm. In this paper we describe how to create such TEEDs and how to use them to analyse and compare various traffic engineering approaches

Evaluation of CupCarbon Network Simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks

[EN] Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a technology in continuous evolution with great future and a huge quantity of applications. The implementation and deployment of a WSN imply important expenses, so it is interesting to simulate the operation of our design before deploying it. In addition, WSNs are limited by a set of parameters such as the low processing capacity, low storing capacity or limited energy. Energy consumption is the most limiting parameter since the network stability and availability depends on the survival of the nodes. To check the correct operation of a network, currently, there are several network simulators and day by day new proposals are launched. This paper presents the evaluation of a new network simulator called CupCarbon. Along the document, we present the main characteristics of this simulator and check its operation by an example. To evaluate the ease of use of this new network simulator, we propose a modified version of Dijkstra algorithm. In addition of considering the cost route to calculate the best route, it considers the remaining energy in nodes as an additional parameter to evaluate the best route. CupCarbon allows implementing our proposal and the results show that our proposal is able to offer a more stable network with an increase of the network lifetime of the 20%. Finally, to extract some conclusions from our experiences, we compare the characteristics and results of CupCarbon with the most common network simulators currently used by researchers. Our conclusions point out that CupCarbon can be used as a complementary tool for those simulators that are not able to monitor the energy consumption in nodes. However, it needs some improvements to reach the level of functionality of the most used simulators. CupCarbon could be an interesting option for academic environments.López-Pavón, C.; Sendra, S.; Valenzuela-Valdés, JF. (2018). Evaluation of CupCarbon Network Simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 10(2):1-27. https://doi.org/10.5296/npa.v10i2.13201S12710

Interactive robot control system and method of use

A robotic system includes a robot having joints, actuators, and sensors, and a distributed controller. The controller includes command-level controller, embedded joint-level controllers each controlling a respective joint, and a joint coordination-level controller coordinating motion of the joints. A central data library (CDL) centralizes all control and feedback data, and a user interface displays a status of each joint, actuator, and sensor using the CDL. A parameterized action sequence has a hierarchy of linked events, and allows the control data to be modified in real time. A method of controlling the robot includes transmitting control data through the various levels of the controller, routing all control and feedback data to the CDL, and displaying status and operation of the robot using the CDL. The parameterized action sequences are generated for execution by the robot, and a hierarchy of linked events is created within the sequence

Implementation and evaluation of the sensornet protocol for Contiki

Sensornet Protocol (SP) is a link abstraction layer between the network layer and the link layer for sensor networks. SP was proposed as the core of a future-oriented sensor node architecture that allows flexible and optimized combination between multiple coexisting protocols. This thesis implements the SP sensornet protocol on the Contiki operating system in order to: evaluate the effectiveness of the original SP services; explore further requirements and implementation trade-offs uncovered by the original proposal. We analyze the original SP design and the TinyOS implementation of SP to design the Contiki port. We implement the data sending and receiving part of SP using Contiki processes, and the neighbor management part as a group of global routines. The evaluation consists of a single-hop traffic throughput test and a multihop convergecast test. Both tests are conducted using both simulation and experimentation. We conclude from the evaluation results that SP's link-level abstraction effectively improves modularity in protocol construction without sacrificing performance, and our SP implementation on Contiki lays a good foundation for future protocol innovations in wireless sensor networks

PCLIPS

CLIPS is an expert system, created specifically to allow rapid implementation of an expert system. CLIPS is written in C, and thus needs a very small amount of memory to run. Parallel CLIPS (PCLIPS) is an extension to CLIPS which is intended to be used in situations where a group of expert systems are expected to run simultaneously and occasionally communicate with each other on an integrated network. PCLIPS is a coarse-grained data distribution system. Its main goal is to take information in one knowledge base and distribute it to other knowledge bases so that all the executing expert systems are able to use that knowledge to solve their disparate problems