Agent Based Gameplaying System

Tato práce se zabývá universálními agentními systémy pro hraní her. Oproti běžným agentům, kteří jsou určeni pouze pro určitý druh činnosti nebo konkrétní hru, universální agent musí být schopen hrát prakticky libovolnou hru popsanou ve formálním deklarativním jazyce. Výzvou je především to, že pravidla hry nejsou předem známa, což znemožňuje použití některých optimalizací nebo vytvoření dobré heuristické funkce. Práce je rozdělena na teoretickou a praktickou část. První část představuje oblast univerzálních herních agentů, definuje jazyk GDL pro popis pravidel her a zabývá se vytvářením heuristických funkcí a jejich aplikací v algoritmu Monte Carlo stromové hledání. V praktické části je představen obecný způsob, jak vytvořit novou heuristickou funkci, která je poté integrována do vlastního herního agenta a ten je pak porovnán s dalšími existujícími systémy.This thesis deals with general game playing agent systems. On the contrary with common agents, which are designed only for a specified task or a game, general game playing agents have to be able to play basically any arbitrary game described in a formal declarative language. The biggest challenge is that the game rules are not known beforehand, which makes it impossible to use some optimizations or to make a good heuristic function. The thesis consists of a theoretical and a practical part. The first part introduces the field of general game playing agents, defines the Game Description Language and covers construction of heuristic evaluation functions and their integration within the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. In the practical part, a general method of creating a new heuristic function is presented, which is later integrated into a proper agent, which is compared then with other systems.

Providing crowd-sourced and real-time media services through a NDN-based platform

International audienceThe diffusion of social networks and broadband technologies is letting emerge large online communities of people that stay always in touch with each other and exchange messages, thoughts, photos, videos, files, and any other type of contents. At the same time, due to the introduction of crowd-sourcing strategies, according to which services and contents can be obtained by soliciting contributions from a group of users, the amount of data generated and exchanged within a social community may experience a radical increment never seen before. In this context, it becomes essential to guarantee resource scalability and load balancing to support real time media delivery. To this end, the present book chapter aims at investigating the design of a network architecture, based on the emerging Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm, providing crowd-sourced real-time media contents. Such an architecture is composed by four different entities: a very large group of heterogeneous devices that produce media contents to be shared, an equally large group of users interested in them, a distributed Event Management System that creates events and handles the social community, and a NDN communication infrastructure able to efficiently manage users requests and distribute multimedia contents. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have evaluate its performance through a simulation campaign using real-world topologies

マルチレベル並列化とアプリケーション指向データレイアウトを用いるハードウェアアクセラレータの設計と実装

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : （主査）東京大学教授 稲葉 雅幸, 東京大学教授 須田 礼仁, 東京大学教授 五十嵐 健夫, 東京大学教授 山西 健司, 東京大学准教授 稲葉 真理, 東京大学講師 中山 英樹University of Tokyo(東京大学

Bridging the Gap between Machine and Language using First-Class Building Blocks

High-performance virtual machines (VMs) are increasingly reused for programming languages for which they were not initially designed. Unfortunately, VMs are usually tailored to specific languages, offer only a very limited interface to running applications, and are closed to extensions. As a consequence, extensions required to support new languages often entail the construction of custom VMs, thus impacting reuse, compatibility and performance. Short of building a custom VM, the language designer has to choose between the expressiveness and the performance of the language. In this dissertation we argue that the best way to open the VM is to eliminate it. We present Pinocchio, a natively compiled Smalltalk, in which we identify and reify three basic building blocks for object-oriented languages. First we define a protocol for message passing similar to calling conventions, independent of the actual message lookup mechanism. The lookup is provided by a self-supporting runtime library written in Smalltalk and compiled to native code. Since it unifies the meta- and base-level we obtain a metaobject protocol (MOP). Then we decouple the language-level manipulation of state from the machine-level implementation by extending the structural reflective model of the language with object layouts, layout scopes and slots. Finally we reify behavior using AST nodes and first-class interpreters separate from the low-level language implementation. We describe the implementations of all three first-class building blocks. For each of the blocks we provide a series of examples illustrating how they enable typical extensions to the runtime, and we provide benchmarks validating the practicality of the approaches

MediaSync: Handbook on Multimedia Synchronization

This book provides an approachable overview of the most recent advances in the fascinating field of media synchronization (mediasync), gathering contributions from the most representative and influential experts. Understanding the challenges of this field in the current multi-sensory, multi-device, and multi-protocol world is not an easy task. The book revisits the foundations of mediasync, including theoretical frameworks and models, highlights ongoing research efforts, like hybrid broadband broadcast (HBB) delivery and users' perception modeling (i.e., Quality of Experience or QoE), and paves the way for the future (e.g., towards the deployment of multi-sensory and ultra-realistic experiences). Although many advances around mediasync have been devised and deployed, this area of research is getting renewed attention to overcome remaining challenges in the next-generation (heterogeneous and ubiquitous) media ecosystem. Given the significant advances in this research area, its current relevance and the multiple disciplines it involves, the availability of a reference book on mediasync becomes necessary. This book fills the gap in this context. In particular, it addresses key aspects and reviews the most relevant contributions within the mediasync research space, from different perspectives. Mediasync: Handbook on Multimedia Synchronization is the perfect companion for scholars and practitioners that want to acquire strong knowledge about this research area, and also approach the challenges behind ensuring the best mediated experiences, by providing the adequate synchronization between the media elements that constitute these experiences

Bridging the Gap between Machine and Language using First-Class Building Blocks

High-performance virtual machines (VMs) are increasingly reused for programming languages for which they were not initially designed. Unfortunately, VMs are usually tailored to specific languages, offer only a very limited interface to running applications, and are closed to extensions. As a consequence, extensions required to support new languages often entail the construction of custom VMs, thus impacting reuse, compatibility and performance. Short of building a custom VM, the language designer has to choose between the expressiveness and the performance of the language. In this dissertation we argue that the best way to open the VM is to eliminate it. We present Pinocchio, a natively compiled Smalltalk, in which we identify and reify three basic building blocks for object-oriented languages. First we define a protocol for message passing similar to calling conventions, independent of the actual message lookup mechanism. The lookup is provided by a self-supporting runtime library written in Smalltalk and compiled to native code. Since it unifies the meta- and base-level we obtain a metaobject protocol (MOP). Then we decouple the language-level manipulation of state from the machine-level implementation by extending the structural reflective model of the language with object layouts, layout scopes and slots. Finally we reify behavior using AST nodes and first-class interpreters separate from the low-level language implementation. We describe the implementations of all three first-class building blocks. For each of the blocks we provide a series of examples illustrating how they enable typical extensions to the runtime, and we provide benchmarks validating the practicality of the approaches

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications