Adaptive display power management for mobile games

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Dynamic power management: from portable devices to high performance computing

Electronic applications are nowadays converging under the umbrella of the cloud computing vision. The future ecosystem of information and communication technology is going to integrate clouds of portable clients and embedded devices exchanging information, through the internet layer, with processing clusters of servers, data-centers and high performance computing systems. Even thus the whole society is waiting to embrace this revolution, there is a backside of the story. Portable devices require battery to work far from the power plugs and their storage capacity does not scale as the increasing power requirement does. At the other end processing clusters, such as data-centers and server farms, are build upon the integration of thousands multiprocessors. For each of them during the last decade the technology scaling has produced a dramatic increase in power density with significant spatial and temporal variability. This leads to power and temperature hot-spots, which may cause non-uniform ageing and accelerated chip failure. Nonetheless all the heat removed from the silicon translates in high cooling costs. Moreover trend in ICT carbon footprint shows that run-time power consumption of the all spectrum of devices accounts for a significant slice of entire world carbon emissions. This thesis work embrace the full ICT ecosystem and dynamic power consumption concerns by describing a set of new and promising system levels resource management techniques to reduce the power consumption and related issues for two corner cases: Mobile Devices and High Performance Computing

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Generation of a combined dataset of simulated radar and electro-optical imagery

In the world of remote sensing there exist radar sensors and EO/IR sensors, both of which carry with them unique information useful to the imaging community. Radar has the capability of imaging through all types of weather, day or night. EO/IR produces radiance maps and frequently images at much finer resolution than radar. While each of these systems is valuable to imaging, there exists unknown territory in the imaging community as to the value added in combining the best of both these worlds. This work will begin to explore the challenges in simulating a scene in both a radar tool called Xpatch and an EO/IR tool called DIRSIG. The capabilities and limitations inherent to both radar and EO/IR are similar in the image simulation tools, so the work done in a simulated environment will carry over to the real-world environment as well. The synthetic data generated will be compared to existing measured data to demonstrate the validity of the experiment. Future work should explore registration and various types of fusion of the resulting images to demonstrate the synergistic value of the combined images

Advanced Platform Systems Technology study. Volume 2: Trade study and technology selection

Three primary tasks were identified which include task 1-trade studies, task 2-trade study comparison and technology selection, and task 3-technology definition. Task 1 general objectives were to identify candidate technology trade areas, determine which areas have the highest potential payoff, define specific trades within the high payoff areas, and perform the trade studies. In order to satisfy these objectives, a structured, organized approach was employed. Candidate technology areas and specific trades were screened using consistent selection criteria and considering possible interrelationships. A data base comprising both manned and unmanned space platform documentation was used as a source of system and subsystem requirements. When requirements were not stated in the data base documentation, assumptions were made and recorded where necessary to characterize a particular spacecraft system. The requirements and assumptions were used together with the selection criteria to establish technology advancement goals and select trade studies. While both manned and unmanned platform data were used, the study was focused on the concept of an early manned space station

Museum Lighting - an holistic approach

Among the environmental parameters that effect exhibited artifacts, light is the most complex and the only essential for the observer as to appreciate the artifacts, thus being one of the most critical variables of art exposure. Research on strategies for energy saving and the renovation of light destined to Heritage is examined by daylight admission and Light-Emitting Diode (LED) technology. The extended review of the literature presented below, over museum lighting, evidenced the parallel advance of lighting principles with lighting design, concerning what determines visual quality and perception. Lighting quality is an interdisciplinaryfield of research affecting human activity and under a requested task, visual performance, while at the same time improving well-being. In this sense, the role of the lighting designer is to match and rank human needs with economic and environmental aspects as to architectural principles and to translate the results into a feasible design and an efficient installation. Quality factors for art exposure, involving color fidelity and damage, along with visual perception necessitate of useful metrics through established criteria. The challenge for the museum for a holistic design of natural and artificial light is still missing of substantial metrics, even though recent findings provide some insight on the workflow to establish. Luminance-based design metrics and contrast criteria are used in this study as key strategies for museum lighting, combining comfort and viewing fine arts through advanced computer rendering. The exploration of the transition inside a daylit gallery where moving in the museum environment offers an experience for a series of adaptation changes through photopic, mesopic and dark-adapted scotopic function, along with change on the sensitivity of the spectrum. The luminance appearance and the transition adaptation in the museum field lack of research examination; the relationship of prescriptive requirements and luminance- based design has been explored initially in the field of road lighting, where the relative visual performance has been evidenced to be in the center of the CIE standard for tunnel lighting. Daylight simulation via climate-based modeling, introducing daylight filters as solar shading devices, has been proposed as the object of experimental research, connecting light “filtering” with luminance; this workflow could be applied in several fields of research considering museum environment and give responses in the preservation of artwork involving daylight. The subject of this thesis is the proposal of a ‘trama’ surface installed on windows to reduce and control daylight, studying how energy and conservation targets can be achieved. New light sources and smart control systems will integrate to a holistic approach for museum lighting design

Appearance-based image splitting for HDR display systems

High dynamic range displays that incorporate two optically-coupled image planes have recently been developed. This dual image plane design requires that a given HDR input image be split into two complementary standard dynamic range components that drive the coupled systems, therefore there existing image splitting issue. In this research, two types of HDR display systems (hardcopy and softcopy HDR display) are constructed to facilitate the study of HDR image splitting algorithm for building HDR displays. A new HDR image splitting algorithm which incorporates iCAM06 image appearance model is proposed, seeking to create displayed HDR images that can provide better image quality. The new algorithm has potential to improve image details perception, colorfulness and better gamut utilization. Finally, the performance of the new iCAM06-based HDR image splitting algorithm is evaluated and compared with widely spread luminance square root algorithm through psychophysical studies