La formación de un lecto-escritor multimedia

Over the last three years, I've been invited to speak to around ten thousand students in schools all over Brazil, relating my professional experience as an author, scriptwriter, and video game designer. In this series of talks, entitled "Doors", I relate to the students how reading has opened possibilities throughout my lifetime, leading me through four different careers and a multitude of multimedia publication

Using principal component analysis for early fault detection in Louisville water distribution system.

This research dealt with the examination of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) information of a water distribution system through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). PCA is a mathematical method to convert a set of possibly correlated data into a set of fewer variables called principal components. In a SCADA environment, possibly hundreds of data points such as booster pumps, storage tanks, pressure reducing valves, and others constantly provide operational statistics including water pressure, tank capacity, and more. This vast amount of data can be difficult to analyze in its entirety, especially to detect issues in the distribution system. PCA was utilized to observe abnormalities in these SCADA readings. Each SCADA data point was used as an input variable to PCA such as the pressure flow through a pump. Various calculations could be achieved by examining data points from a specific pressure zone or through the entire system. Breaking down the observations into specific areas resulted in better identification of the problem location. Each SCADA data point also provides an updated reading each minute. At the same interval, the principal component is calculated along with the variance of the prior twenty minutes worth of data. The difference between the current variance and the previous minute’s variance highlights possible issues when compared to normal operations. For instance, at 11 am, the current principal component is computed and the principal component results from 10:40 am to 11 am are used as inputs in determining the current variance. This variance, when compared to the previous minute’s variance, is plotted to show deviations in the data. One principal component was calculated each minute resulting in a single value to correlate all provided inputs regardless of the number of SCADA data points analyzed. Analysis of normal operations still results in varying outputs as a result of low and high demand on the water distribution system throughout the day but maintains a regular pattern. Review of data during a main break condition emphasizes the irregular pattern signaling a possible fault. PCA interpretation can be an additional monitoring tool of the distribution system to provide advanced warning of main breaks or other system issues

Apontamentos para o Estudo de Adaptações de Jogos Digitais

Adaptações de jogos digitais é uma área pouco estudada e rica em possibilidades para pesquisa. Este artigo apresenta as adaptações mais comuns de jogos digitais e aponta áreas para o estudo destas adaptações. As áreas discutidas incluem: processos, transmídia e remidiação. Para cada área, o artigo sugere múltiplas abordagens para as pesquisas

Performances VS Reliability: how to exploit Approximate Computing for Safety-Critical applications

International audienceApproximate Computing (AxC) paradigm aims at designing energy-efficient systems, saving computational resources , and presenting better execution times. AxC aims to selectively violate the specifications, trading accuracy off for efficiency. It has been demonstrated in the literature the effectiveness of imprecise computation for both software and hardware components implementing inexact algorithms, showing an inherent resiliency to errors. On the other hand, the hidden cost of AxC is the reduction on the inherent resiliency to errors of an application. This paper aims at analyzing the impact of AxC on the reliability

O ROTEIRISTA DE MÍDIAS E A SALA DE AULA: OBSERVAÇÕES E APONTAMENTOS

Neste artigo, o autor oferece observações feitas ao longo de trinta e nove encontros com escolas em três estados, no seu papel de roteirista de mídias. Nestes encontros, o autor perguntou aos alunos sobre seus hábitos de leitura e consumo de outras mídias. Baseado nestas observações, o autor busca novos métodos para atingir o aluno e formar mais leitores. Uma possibilidade para aprofundar, tanto em termos de pesquisa quanto de prática, é a ficção interativa, que é discutida em detalhes, junto com sugestões para sua aplicação na sala de aula no desenvolvimento da leitura e da escrita

Evaluating Architectural, Redundancy, and Implementation Strategies for Radiation Hardening of FinFET Integrated Circuits

In this article, authors explore radiation hardening techniques through the design of a test chip implemented in 16-nm FinFET technology, along with architectural and redundancy design space exploration of its modules. Nine variants of matrix multiplication were taped out and irradiated with neutrons. The results obtained from the neutron campaign revealed that the radiation-hardened variants present superior resiliency when either local or global triple modular redundancy (TMR) schemes are employed. Furthermore, simulation-based fault injection was utilized to validate the measurements and to explore the effects of different implementation strategies on failure rates. We further show that the interplay between these different implementation strategies is not trivial to capture and that synthesis optimizations can effectively break assumptions about the effectiveness of redundancy schemes

Application-Based Analysis of Register File Criticality for Reliability Assessment in Embedded Microprocessors

There is an increasing concern to reduce the cost and overheads during the development of reliable systems. Selective protection of most critical parts of the systems represents a viable solution to obtain a high level of reliability at a fraction of the cost. In particular to design a selective fault mitigation strategy for processor-based systems, it is mandatory to identify and prioritize the most vulnerable registers in the register file as best candidates to be protected (hardened). This paper presents an application-based metric to estimate the criticality of each register from the microprocessor register file in microprocessor-based systems. The proposed metric relies on the combination of three different criteria based on common features of executed applications. The applicability and accuracy of our proposal have been evaluated in a set of applications running in different microprocessors. Results show a significant improvement in accuracy compared to previous approaches and regardless of the underlying architecture.This work was funded in part by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports with the project “Developing hybrid fault tolerance techniques for embedded microprocessors” (PHB2012-0158-PC)

S-SETA: Selective Software-Only Error-Detection Technique Using Assertions

Software-based techniques offer several advantages to increase the reliability of processor-based systems at very low cost, but they cause performance degradation and an increase of the code size. To meet constraints in performance and memory, we propose SETA, a new control-flow software-only technique that uses assertions to detect errors affecting the program flow. SETA is an independent technique, but it was conceived to work together with previously proposed data-flow techniques that aim at reducing performance and memory overheads. Thus, SETA is combined with such data-flow techniques and submitted to a fault injection campaign. Simulation and neutron induced SEE tests show high fault coverage at performance and memory overheads inferior to the state-of-the-art.This work was supported in part by CNPq and CAPES, Brazilian agencies