CCAFS Program of Work and Budget 2016

The 2016 program of work and budget of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) lays out the key activities and budget in 2016

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

Development of Testing Tools for Substation Automation and SCADA Systems

ABSTRACT This master’s thesis describes the work in developing new testing tools for substation automation and SCADA systems. The targets of development are ABB’s MicroSCADA Pro product family of network management products. Main focus is on the SYS600 Control System, which is used to monitor and control process automation applications in e.g. substations. The new testing tools will be used to test operational situations in test environments, with the tested situations being similar to the situations occurring in practical environments. First parts of the work concentrated on collecting information related to existing testing processes and testing tools in the context where the new tools could be used. Information was collected from expert interviews, literature and prior development experiences of similar testing tools. The information was used to define requirements and features for the new tools. Initial development environment was set up based on the work and a system implementation proposal was written to describe the implementation of the new testing tools to existing products and processes. The development of the new testing tools was based on the internal development tools of the MicroSCADA Pro SYS600 and the native programming languages SCIL and Visual SCIL. With these tools and languages the new testing tools could be developed with optimal compatibility to the products, similar to the several existing testing tools which were included in the development process. The development applied agile principles by following iterative and incremental development cycles, where demo presentations with feedback followed the development and testing stages cyclically. The development succeeded with the result being a new operational situations testing tool with three main testing features: test case based testing, simulation run testing and communication gateway testing. Supporting features were included in the tool to set up tests with setup actions and generate test result data from the executed tests. Features from the existing testing tools were successfully combined with newly developed features, and the possibilities for future work related to the tool were considered in the end.TIIVISTELMÄ Diplomityön aiheena on uusien testaustyökalujen kehittäminen sähköasema-automaatio- ja SCADA -järjestelmille. Kehitystyön kohteena on ABB:n MicroSCADA Pro tuoteperhe, joka koostuu verkonhallinnan tuotteista. Työssä keskitytään SYS600 Control System -tuotteeseen, jota käytetään prosessiautomaatiosovellusten ohjaukseen ja valvontaan esimerkiksi sähköasemilla. Uusia testaustyökaluja tullaan käyttämään sovellusten käyttötilanteiden testaamiseen, jolloin käytännön tilanteita vastaavia testaustilanteita pyritään luomaan testausympäristöissä. Työn ensimmäisissä osissa keskityttiin tiedonkeruuseen senhetkisistä testausprosesseista ja käytetyistä testaustyökaluista selvittäen uusien työkalujen käyttömahdollisuuksia. Tiedonkeruun lähteinä olivat asiantuntijahaastattelut, alan kirjallisuus ja aikaisempi kehitystieto samankaltaisista testaustyökaluista. Tiedon perusteella uusille työkaluille voitiin määrittää vaatimuksia ja toiminnallisuutta. Työlle valmisteltiin sopiva kehitysympäristö sekä implementaatioehdotus, joka selvittää uusien testaustyökalujen liittämistä olemassa oleviin tuotteisiin ja prosesseihin. Kehitystyö perustui MicroSCADA Pro SYS600 -tuotteen sisäisiin kehitystyökaluihin ja tuotteen omiin SCIL- ja Visual SCIL -ohjelmointikieliin. Käyttämällä näitä työkaluja ja ohjelmointikieliä uudet testaustyökalut voitiin kehittää optimaalisella yhteensopivuudella tuotteisiin samaan tapaan kuin monet olemassa olevat työkalut, jotka olivat mukana kehitysprosessissa. Kehityksessä sovellettiin ketteriä menetelmiä käyttämällä iteratiivisia ja inkrementaalisia kehityssyklejä, joissa demoesitykset palautteineen seurasivat kehitys- ja testausvaiheita jaksollisesti. Onnistuneen kehitystyön seurauksena saatiin aikaan uusi käyttötilanteiden testaustyökalu, joka sisältää kolme pääasiallista testaustoimintoa: yksittäiset testaustilanteet, laaja simulaatiotestaus ja kommunikaatioyhdyskäytävän testaus. Testauksen valmistelutoiminnot ja testaustulosten raportointi sisällytettiin työkaluun testausta tukevina toimintoina. Aiemmin kehitetyistä työkaluista sisällytettiin onnistuneesti ominaisuuksia uuteen työkaluun osana kehitystä, ja lopuksi voitiin arvioida työkalun tulevaisuuden kehitystä

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

FPGAs in Industrial Control Applications

The aim of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies and their contribution to industrial control applications. Authors start by addressing various research fields which can exploit the advantages of FPGAs. The features of these devices are then presented, followed by their corresponding design tools. To illustrate the benefits of using FPGAs in the case of complex control applications, a sensorless motor controller has been treated. This controller is based on the Extended Kalman Filter. Its development has been made according to a dedicated design methodology, which is also discussed. The use of FPGAs to implement artificial intelligence-based industrial controllers is then briefly reviewed. The final section presents two short case studies of Neural Network control systems designs targeting FPGAs

A Survey on Design Methodologies for Accelerating Deep Learning on Heterogeneous Architectures

In recent years, the field of Deep Learning has seen many disruptive and impactful advancements. Given the increasing complexity of deep neural networks, the need for efficient hardware accelerators has become more and more pressing to design heterogeneous HPC platforms. The design of Deep Learning accelerators requires a multidisciplinary approach, combining expertise from several areas, spanning from computer architecture to approximate computing, computational models, and machine learning algorithms. Several methodologies and tools have been proposed to design accelerators for Deep Learning, including hardware-software co-design approaches, high-level synthesis methods, specific customized compilers, and methodologies for design space exploration, modeling, and simulation. These methodologies aim to maximize the exploitable parallelism and minimize data movement to achieve high performance and energy efficiency. This survey provides a holistic review of the most influential design methodologies and EDA tools proposed in recent years to implement Deep Learning accelerators, offering the reader a wide perspective in this rapidly evolving field. In particular, this work complements the previous survey proposed by the same authors in [203], which focuses on Deep Learning hardware accelerators for heterogeneous HPC platforms