The future of computing beyond Moore's Law.

Moore's Law is a techno-economic model that has enabled the information technology industry to double the performance and functionality of digital electronics roughly every 2 years within a fixed cost, power and area. Advances in silicon lithography have enabled this exponential miniaturization of electronics, but, as transistors reach atomic scale and fabrication costs continue to rise, the classical technological driver that has underpinned Moore's Law for 50 years is failing and is anticipated to flatten by 2025. This article provides an updated view of what a post-exascale system will look like and the challenges ahead, based on our most recent understanding of technology roadmaps. It also discusses the tapering of historical improvements, and how it affects options available to continue scaling of successors to the first exascale machine. Lastly, this article covers the many different opportunities and strategies available to continue computing performance improvements in the absence of historical technology drivers. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'

Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

On Agent-Based Software Engineering

Agent-based computing represents an exciting new synthesis both for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, more generally, Computer Science. It has the potential to significantly improve the theory and the practice of modeling, designing, and implementing computer systems. Yet, to date, there has been little systematic analysis of what makes the agent-based approach such an appealing and powerful computational model. Moreover, even less effort has been devoted to discussing the inherent disadvantages that stem from adopting an agent-oriented view. Here both sets of issues are explored. The standpoint of this analysis is the role of agent-based software in solving complex, real-world problems. In particular, it will be argued that the development of robust and scalable software systems requires autonomous agents that can complete their objectives while situated in a dynamic and uncertain environment, that can engage in rich, high-level social interactions, and that can operate within flexible organisational structures

Reasoning About a Simulated Printer Case Investigation with Forensic Lucid

In this work we model the ACME (a fictitious company name) "printer case incident" and make its specification in Forensic Lucid, a Lucid- and intensional-logic-based programming language for cyberforensic analysis and event reconstruction specification. The printer case involves a dispute between two parties that was previously solved using the finite-state automata (FSA) approach, and is now re-done in a more usable way in Forensic Lucid. Our simulation is based on the said case modeling by encoding concepts like evidence and the related witness accounts as an evidential statement context in a Forensic Lucid program, which is an input to the transition function that models the possible deductions in the case. We then invoke the transition function (actually its reverse) with the evidential statement context to see if the evidence we encoded agrees with one's claims and then attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events that may explain the claim or disprove it.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 7 listings, TOC, index; this article closely relates to arXiv:0906.0049 and arXiv:0904.3789 but to remain stand-alone repeats some of the background and introductory content; abstract presented at HSC'09 and the full updated paper at ICDF2C'11. This is an updated/edited version after ICDF2C proceedings with more references and correction