Digital signal processing: the impact of convergence on education, society and design flow

Design and development of real-time, memory and processor hungry digital signal processing systems has for decades been accomplished on general-purpose microprocessors. Increasing needs for high-performance DSP systems made these microprocessors unattractive for such implementations. Various attempts to improve the performance of these systems resulted in the use of dedicated digital signal processing devices like DSP processors and the former heavyweight champion of electronics design – Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The advent of RAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays has changed the DSP design flow. Software algorithmic designers can now take their DSP algorithms right from inception to hardware implementation, thanks to the increasing availability of software/hardware design flow or hardware/software co-design. This has led to a demand in the industry for graduates with good skills in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This paper evaluates the impact of technology on DSP-based designs, hardware design languages, and how graduate/undergraduate courses have changed to suit this transition

Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization

Tag clouds provide an aggregate of tag-usage statistics. They are typically sent as in-line HTML to browsers. However, display mechanisms suited for ordinary text are not ideal for tags, because font sizes may vary widely on a line. As well, the typical layout does not account for relationships that may be known between tags. This paper presents models and algorithms to improve the display of tag clouds that consist of in-line HTML, as well as algorithms that use nested tables to achieve a more general 2-dimensional layout in which tag relationships are considered. The first algorithms leverage prior work in typesetting and rectangle packing, whereas the second group of algorithms leverage prior work in Electronic Design Automation. Experiments show our algorithms can be efficiently implemented and perform well.Comment: To appear in proceedings of Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization (WWW 2007

Meaning in Architecture: Affordances, Atmosphere and Mood

Abstract: Meaning in Architecture: Affordances, Atmosphere and Mood, began as a public forum about human awareness of building, specifically speaking to the significance of affordances, embodied simulation theory, atmosphere and mood. It is herewith presented in copy form for broader distribution. An exchange between scientists and architects, this symposium was the inaugural Interface event of ANFA (the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, Salk Institute) held 17 April 2018 in the Regnier Forum of APDesign, Kansas State University. The authors for Meaning in Architecture: Affordances, Atmosphere and Mood will escort you to the intersection of deep brain function, as studied by neuroscientists, and our built-environment the expertise of architects. Unmistakably, these subjects are no longer separate matters of analysis, rather a collective pursuit to discover the physiological framework when confronted with our natural and built environment. Or to borrow from Dr. Rooney’s “Introduction:” What benefit, if any, is there to gain by combining the efforts of architecture and neuroscience? The former profession lays claim to thousands of years of physically manifesting civilization, while the latter, whose own enlightenment is taking shape, has greatly expanded our conceptualization of how our minds operate. Did the ancient Greeks suffer from a lack of neuroscientific knowledge when building the Parthenon? Did early neuroscientist need to know about architecture in order to discover the relationship between lesions and motor activity? No. Although that answer is true, it seems to remove a very common element amongst both professions. The element of environments. Regardless of your position as an architect, a neuroscientist or as a lay philosopher, humans live in the world and that world is predominantly built by humans. Any study of neuroscience inevitably must ground its findings in our world if it is to say anything useful, and any built architecture must come forth through the use of imagination held together by the neurons firing across regions in the brain. Speaking to our body, brain, and environments agenda, Dr. Michael Arbib, a neuroscientist studying buildings and their design, discusses in “The Architecture-Neuroscience Conversation and the Action-Perception Cycle,” the makeup of our brain and its relevant purposes, specifically the significance of the hippocampus. With knowledge stretching beyond cognitive generalities, architects and neuroscientists alike can begin to join design intentions to the human’s subconscious need to create place and memory through cognitive mapping. Through “Place, Peripheral Vision, and Space Perception: a pilot study in VR.” Dr. Colin Ellard and Robert Condia demonstrate the consequences of our peripheral and central vision. Investigated were measured human physiological responses, using biofeedback technology for subjects in virtual reality settings of 2 urban squares one classical and one in glass modernism. The lesson learnt is that central vision has little to do with perceiving where we are in space. Similarly, Dr. Brent Chamberlain’s “The Physio-Affective Built Environment” explores the exchange of the body and space in a direct application to our urban environment in a real-world experiment. Exposing our bodies to different environmental characteristics allow for real time biological results when crossing a street or turning a corner; an action we perform in our daily lives without consideration for its effect on our physiology. Our contract with space is this, the environment (built and otherwise) directly effects how we feel at any particular moment and place in time. Necessarily, our conversation begins by exploring the brain and body’s physiological response to constructed environments. To wit. recent advances in the biological sciences confirm how we construct and imagine space, while opening new doors to understanding perception holistically within our experience of architecture and urban design. Architecture embodies our natural tendencies and potentials for actions, what we now know as affordances of space. Interestingly, what you expect of a place has much to do with what it will afford you. Comments \u27\u27This collection of research uncovers key findings--for one, that central, focused vision has little to do with how we experience the ambience of a city square, that peripheral vision is more suited to the richness of architectural experience and that expectation and imaginative perception condition what our surroundings might afford us. These findings confirm what the very best architects have long known through their embodied knowledge honed in many years of practice--making it available to young architects who are just entering the field. What is more--the process of this research underscores the value of interdisciplinary collaboration precisely because it brings the embodied methods and intuitions of the architect together with the biocultural constraints being discovered in neuroscience to bear on the crucial project of designing the settings in which our daily lives unfold. - Sarah Robinson, AIAhttps://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1033/thumbnail.jp

EmotIoT: an IoT system to improve users’ wellbeing

IoT provides applications and possibilities to improve people’s daily lives and business environments. However, most of these technologies have not been exploited in the field of emotions. With the amount of data that can be collected through IoT, emotions could be detected and anticipated. Since the study of related works indicates a lack of methodological approaches in designing IoT systems from the perspective of emotions and smart adaption rules, we introduce a methodology that can help design IoT systems quickly in this scenario, where the detection of users is valuable. In order to test the methodology presented, we apply the proposed stages to design an IoT smart recommender system named EmotIoT. The system allows anticipating and predicting future users’ emotions using parameters collected from IoT devices. It recommends new activities for the user in order to obtain a final state. Test results validate our recommender system as it has obtained more than 80% accuracy in predicting future user emotions

AI/ML Algorithms and Applications in VLSI Design and Technology

An evident challenge ahead for the integrated circuit (IC) industry in the nanometer regime is the investigation and development of methods that can reduce the design complexity ensuing from growing process variations and curtail the turnaround time of chip manufacturing. Conventional methodologies employed for such tasks are largely manual; thus, time-consuming and resource-intensive. In contrast, the unique learning strategies of artificial intelligence (AI) provide numerous exciting automated approaches for handling complex and data-intensive tasks in very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design and testing. Employing AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms in VLSI design and manufacturing reduces the time and effort for understanding and processing the data within and across different abstraction levels via automated learning algorithms. It, in turn, improves the IC yield and reduces the manufacturing turnaround time. This paper thoroughly reviews the AI/ML automated approaches introduced in the past towards VLSI design and manufacturing. Moreover, we discuss the scope of AI/ML applications in the future at various abstraction levels to revolutionize the field of VLSI design, aiming for high-speed, highly intelligent, and efficient implementations

Examining trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of urban form

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)