Functional Verification of Power Electronic Systems

This project is the final work of the degree in Industrial Electronics and Automatic Engineering. It has global concepts of electronics but it focuses in power electronic systems. There is a need for reliable testing systems to ensure the good functionality of power electronic systems. The constant evolution of this products requires the development of new testing techniques. This project aims to develop a new testing system to accomplish the functional verification of a new power electronic system manufactured on a company that is in the power electronic sector . This test system consists on two test bed platforms, one to test the control part of the systems and the other one to test their functionality. A software to perform the test is also designed. Finally, the testing protocol is presented. This design is validated and then implemented on a buck converter and an inverter that are manufactured at the company. The results show that the test system is reliable and is capable of testing the functional verification of the two power electronic system successfully. In summary, this design can be introduced in the power electronic production process to test the two products ensuring their reliability in the market

CSP channels for CAN-bus connected embedded control systems

Closed loop control system typically contains multitude of sensors and actuators operated simultaneously. So they are parallel and distributed in its essence. But when mapping this parallelism to software, lot of obstacles concerning multithreading communication and synchronization issues arise. To overcome this problem, the CT kernel/library based on CSP algebra has been developed. This project (TES.5410) is about developing communication extension to the CT library to make it applicable in distributed systems. Since the library is tailored for control systems, properties and requirements of control systems are taken into special consideration. Applicability of existing middleware solutions is examined. A comparison of applicable fieldbus protocols is done in order to determine most suitable ones and CAN fieldbus is chosen to be first fieldbus used. Brief overview of CSP and existing CSP based libraries is given. Middleware architecture is proposed along with few novel ideas

Measurements, Models, Systems and Design

531 s.

EXACT2: the semantics of biomedical protocols

© 2014 Soldatova et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: The reliability and reproducibility of experimental procedures is a cornerstone of scientific practice. There is a pressing technological need for the better representation of biomedical protocols to enable other agents (human or machine) to better reproduce results. A framework that ensures that all information required for the replication of experimental protocols is essential to achieve reproducibility. Methods: We have developed the ontology EXACT2 (EXperimental ACTions) that is designed to capture the full semantics of biomedical protocols required for their reproducibility. To construct EXACT2 we manually inspected hundreds of published and commercial biomedical protocols from several areas of biomedicine. After establishing a clear pattern for extracting the required information we utilized text-mining tools to translate the protocols into a machine amenable format. We have verified the utility of EXACT2 through the successful processing of previously ‘unseen’ (not used for the construction of EXACT2) protocols. Results: The paper reports on a fundamentally new version EXACT2 that supports the semantically-defined representation of biomedical protocols. The ability of EXACT2 to capture the semantics of biomedical procedures was verified through a text mining use case. In this EXACT2 is used as a reference model for text mining tools to identify terms pertinent to experimental actions, and their properties, in biomedical protocols expressed in natural language. An EXACT2-based framework for the translation of biomedical protocols to a machine amenable format is proposed. Conclusions: The EXACT2 ontology is sufficient to record, in a machine processable form, the essential information about biomedical protocols. EXACT2 defines explicit semantics of experimental actions, and can be used by various computer applications. It can serve as a reference model for for the translation of biomedical protocols in natural language into a semantically-defined format.This work has been partially funded by the Brunel University BRIEF award and a grant from Occams Resources

(De-)Constructing TLS 1.3

SSL/TLS is one of the most widely deployed cryptographic protocols on the Internet. It is used to protect the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted data in various client-server applications. The currently specified version is TLS 1.2, and its security has been analyzed extensively in the cryptographic literature. The IETF working group is actively developing a new version, TLS 1.3, which is designed to address several flaws inherent to previous versions. In this paper, we analyze the security of a slightly modified version of the current TLS 1.3 draft. (We do not encrypt the server’s certificate.) Our security analysis is performed in the constructive cryptography framework. This ensures that the resulting security guarantees are composable and can readily be used in subsequent protocol steps, such as password-based user authentication over a TLS-based communication channel in which only the server is authenticated. Most steps of our proof hold in the standard model, with the sole exception that the key derivation function HKDF is used in a way that has a proof only in the random-oracle model. Beyond the technical results on TLS 1.3, this work also exemplifies a novel approach towards proving the security of complex protocols by a modular, step-by-step decomposition, in which smaller sub-steps are proved in isolation and then the security of the protocol follows by the composition theorem

Prediction of psychosis across protocols and risk cohorts using automated language analysis

Language and speech are the primary source of data for psychiatrists to diagnose and treat mental disorders. In psychosis, the very structure of language can be disturbed, including semantic coherence (e.g., derailment and tangentiality) and syntactic complexity (e.g., concreteness). Subtle disturbances in language are evident in schizophrenia even prior to first psychosis onset, during prodromal stages. Using computer-based natural language processing analyses, we previously showed that, among English-speaking clinical (e.g., ultra) high-risk youths, baseline reduction in semantic coherence (the flow of meaning in speech) and in syntactic complexity could predict subsequent psychosis onset with high accuracy. Herein, we aimed to cross-validate these automated linguistic analytic methods in a second larger risk cohort, also English-speaking, and to discriminate speech in psychosis from normal speech. We identified an automated machine-learning speech classifier – comprising decreased semantic coherence, greater variance in that coherence, and reduced usage of possessive pronouns – that had an 83% accuracy in predicting psychosis onset (intra-protocol), a cross-validated accuracy of 79% of psychosis onset prediction in the original risk cohort (cross-protocol), and a 72% accuracy in discriminating the speech of recent-onset psychosis patients from that of healthy individuals. The classifier was highly correlated with previously identified manual linguistic predictors. Our findings support the utility and validity of automated natural language processing methods to characterize disturbances in semantics and syntax across stages of psychotic disorder. The next steps will be to apply these methods in larger risk cohorts to further test reproducibility, also in languages other than English, and identify sources of variability. This technology has the potential to improve prediction of psychosis outcome among at-risk youths and identify linguistic targets for remediation and preventive intervention. More broadly, automated linguistic analysis can be a powerful tool for diagnosis and treatment across neuropsychiatry.Fil: Corcoran, Cheryl M.. Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Estados Unidos. New York State Psychiatric Institute; Estados UnidosFil: Carrillo, Facundo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Fernandez Slezak, Diego. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Bedi, Gillinder. New York State Psychiatric Institute; Estados Unidos. Columbia University; Estados Unidos. University of Melbourne; AustraliaFil: Klim, Casimir. Columbia University; Estados Unidos. New York State Psychiatric Institute; Estados UnidosFil: Javitt, Daniel C.. Columbia University; Estados Unidos. New York State Psychiatric Institute; Estados UnidosFil: Bearden, Carrie E.. University of California at Los Angeles; Estados UnidosFil: Cecchi, Guillermo Alberto. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Estados Unido

Ocean Energy in Belgium - 2019

B

Metastability-Containing Circuits

In digital circuits, metastability can cause deteriorated signals that neither are logical 0 or logical 1, breaking the abstraction of Boolean logic. Unfortunately, any way of reading a signal from an unsynchronized clock domain or performing an analog-to-digital conversion incurs the risk of a metastable upset; no digital circuit can deterministically avoid, resolve, or detect metastability (Marino, 1981). Synchronizers, the only traditional countermeasure, exponentially decrease the odds of maintained metastability over time. Trading synchronization delay for an increased probability to resolve metastability to logical 0 or 1, they do not guarantee success. We propose a fundamentally different approach: It is possible to contain metastability by fine-grained logical masking so that it cannot infect the entire circuit. This technique guarantees a limited degree of metastability in---and uncertainty about---the output. At the heart of our approach lies a time- and value-discrete model for metastability in synchronous clocked digital circuits. Metastability is propagated in a worst-case fashion, allowing to derive deterministic guarantees, without and unlike synchronizers. The proposed model permits positive results and passes the test of reproducing Marino's impossibility results. We fully classify which functions can be computed by circuits with standard registers. Regarding masking registers, we show that they become computationally strictly more powerful with each clock cycle, resulting in a non-trivial hierarchy of computable functions