Dynamically reconfigurable bio-inspired hardware

During the last several years, reconfigurable computing devices have experienced an impressive development in their resource availability, speed, and configurability. Currently, commercial FPGAs offer the possibility of self-reconfiguring by partially modifying their configuration bitstream, providing high architectural flexibility, while guaranteeing high performance. These configurability features have received special interest from computer architects: one can find several reconfigurable coprocessor architectures for cryptographic algorithms, image processing, automotive applications, and different general purpose functions. On the other hand we have bio-inspired hardware, a large research field taking inspiration from living beings in order to design hardware systems, which includes diverse topics: evolvable hardware, neural hardware, cellular automata, and fuzzy hardware, among others. Living beings are well known for their high adaptability to environmental changes, featuring very flexible adaptations at several levels. Bio-inspired hardware systems require such flexibility to be provided by the hardware platform on which the system is implemented. In general, bio-inspired hardware has been implemented on both custom and commercial hardware platforms. These custom platforms are specifically designed for supporting bio-inspired hardware systems, typically featuring special cellular architectures and enhanced reconfigurability capabilities; an example is their partial and dynamic reconfigurability. These aspects are very well appreciated for providing the performance and the high architectural flexibility required by bio-inspired systems. However, the availability and the very high costs of such custom devices make them only accessible to a very few research groups. Even though some commercial FPGAs provide enhanced reconfigurability features such as partial and dynamic reconfiguration, their utilization is still in its early stages and they are not well supported by FPGA vendors, thus making their use difficult to include in existing bio-inspired systems. In this thesis, I present a set of architectures, techniques, and methodologies for benefiting from the configurability advantages of current commercial FPGAs in the design of bio-inspired hardware systems. Among the presented architectures there are neural networks, spiking neuron models, fuzzy systems, cellular automata and random boolean networks. For these architectures, I propose several adaptation techniques for parametric and topological adaptation, such as hebbian learning, evolutionary and co-evolutionary algorithms, and particle swarm optimization. Finally, as case study I consider the implementation of bio-inspired hardware systems in two platforms: YaMoR (Yet another Modular Robot) and ROPES (Reconfigurable Object for Pervasive Systems); the development of both platforms having been co-supervised in the framework of this thesis

An Investigation Into the Interactive Teaching Practices of Librarians in Information Literacy Instruction at the University of Auckland Library

The development of constructivist learning theory has greatly influenced the design and delivery of the Information Literacy instructional programmes. Student-centred teaching methodology has been widely adopted in the IL instruction, however, the challenges library presenters face while practicing interactive teaching methods in their classes still require further investigation. This study aims to respond to the need for a deeper understanding of IL instruction from a teachers' perspective and provide an insight into currently applied interactive practices in IL classroom teaching, as well as associated challenges and effective solutions. An explanatory, sequential mixed methods research design has been applied to further investigate the quantitative information collected in the first phase of the project (an online survey emailed to 55 Subject Librarians at the University of Auckland (UoA)) followed by the second phase of qualitative, in-depth data gathering conducted in the form of nine individual 45 minutes long semi-structured interviews with Subject Librarians at the University of Auckland. The findings confirm the themes already discussed in the library literature, but also reveal new and unexpected elements of IL classroom instruction offered at the tertiary level in New Zealand region. Eleven original interactive classroom activities successfully employed in IL classroom teaching by Subject Librarians at the UoA are also identified during this research project and presented in the report. Suggestions are made for further research

On Fireflies, Cellular Systems, and Evolware

Many observers have marveled at the beauty of the synchronous flashing of fireflies that has an almost hypnotic effect. In this paper we consider the issue of evolving two-dimensional cellular automata as well as random boolean networks to solve the firefly synchronization task. The task was successfully solved by means of cellular programming based co-evolution performing computations in a completely local manner, each cell having access only to its immediate neighbor's states. An FPGA-based Evolware implementation on the BioWall's cellular tissue and different other simulations show that the approach is very efficient and easily implementable in hardware