Emerging research directions in computer science : contributions from the young informatics faculty in Karlsruhe

In order to build better human-friendly human-computer interfaces, such interfaces need to be enabled with capabilities to perceive the user, his location, identity, activities and in particular his interaction with others and the machine. Only with these perception capabilities can smart systems ( for example human-friendly robots or smart environments) become posssible. In my research I\u27m thus focusing on the development of novel techniques for the visual perception of humans and their activities, in order to facilitate perceptive multimodal interfaces, humanoid robots and smart environments. My work includes research on person tracking, person identication, recognition of pointing gestures, estimation of head orientation and focus of attention, as well as audio-visual scene and activity analysis. Application areas are humanfriendly humanoid robots, smart environments, content-based image and video analysis, as well as safety- and security-related applications. This article gives a brief overview of my ongoing research activities in these areas

A Survey of Research into Mixed Criticality Systems

This survey covers research into mixed criticality systems that has been published since Vestal’s seminal paper in 2007, up until the end of 2016. The survey is organised along the lines of the major research areas within this topic. These include single processor analysis (including fixed priority and EDF scheduling, shared resources and static and synchronous scheduling), multiprocessor analysis, realistic models, and systems issues. The survey also explores the relationship between research into mixed criticality systems and other topics such as hard and soft time constraints, fault tolerant scheduling, hierarchical scheduling, cyber physical systems, probabilistic real-time systems, and industrial safety standards

On Dynamic Monitoring Methods for Networks-on-Chip

Rapid ongoing evolution of multiprocessors will lead to systems with hundreds of processing cores integrated in a single chip. An emerging challenge is the implementation of reliable and efficient interconnection between these cores as well as other components in the systems. Network-on-Chip is an interconnection approach which is intended to solve the performance bottleneck caused by traditional, poorly scalable communication structures such as buses. However, a large on-chip network involves issues related to congestion problems and system control, for instance. Additionally, faults can cause problems in multiprocessor systems. These faults can be transient faults, permanent manufacturing faults, or they can appear due to aging. To solve the emerging traffic management, controllability issues and to maintain system operation regardless of faults a monitoring system is needed. The monitoring system should be dynamically applicable to various purposes and it should fully cover the system under observation. In a large multiprocessor the distances between components can be relatively long. Therefore, the system should be designed so that the amount of energy-inefficient long-distance communication is minimized. This thesis presents a dynamically clustered distributed monitoring structure. The monitoring is distributed so that no centralized control is required for basic tasks such as traffic management and task mapping. To enable extensive analysis of different Network-on-Chip architectures, an in-house SystemC based simulation environment was implemented. It allows transaction level analysis without time consuming circuit level implementations during early design phases of novel architectures and features. The presented analysis shows that the dynamically clustered monitoring structure can be efficiently utilized for traffic management in faulty and congested Network-on-Chip-based multiprocessor systems. The monitoring structure can be also successfully applied for task mapping purposes. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the presented in-house simulation environment is flexible and practical tool for extensive Network-on-Chip architecture analysis.Siirretty Doriast

A probabilistic approach to early communication performance estimation for electronic system-level design

Today\u27s embedded system designers face the challenges of ever increasing complexity and shorter time-to-market deadlines. System-level methodologies emerge to meet these challenges. Refinement-based methodologies, such as the SpecC methodology and Transaction Level Modeling, continue to gain popularity in the embedded system designers\u27 community. However, as more communication-dominated applications and architectures appear in the market, designers find that the lack of models allowing system-level communication analysis is a major limiting factor in current system-level design methodologies. Thus, modeling for system-level communication analysis is key for a design methodology to thrive with today\u27s embedded system designers. This work presents a new approach to system-level modeling that allows better communication analysis earlier in the design process. This approach defines a new model that utilizes random variables to include the communication details at higher abstraction levels. This work proposes a probabilistic model to include and evaluate the system communication features in the higher abstraction level. Guidelines to include the proposed model into a refinement-based methodology are presented, and methods for performance estimation are shown

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

System Design for a Long-Line Quantum Repeater

We present a new control algorithm and system design for a network of quantum repeaters, and outline the end-to-end protocol architecture. Such a network will create long-distance quantum states, supporting quantum key distribution as well as distributed quantum computation. Quantum repeaters improve the reduction of quantum-communication throughput with distance from exponential to polynomial. Because a quantum state cannot be copied, a quantum repeater is not a signal amplifier, but rather executes algorithms for quantum teleportation in conjunction with a specialized type of quantum error correction called purification to raise the fidelity of the quantum states. We introduce our banded purification scheme, which is especially effective when the fidelity of coupled qubits is low, improving the prospects for experimental realization of such systems. The resulting throughput is calculated via detailed simulations of a long line composed of shorter hops. Our algorithmic improvements increase throughput by a factor of up to fifty compared to earlier approaches, for a broad range of physical characteristics.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures. v2 includes one new graph, modest corrections to some others, and significantly improved presentation. to appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201