Events, Neural Systems and Time Series

Different types of events occurring in computer, neural, business, and environmental systems are discussed. Though events in these different domains do differ, there are also important commonalities. We discuss the issues arising from automating complex event handling systems

Artificial Intelligence

Contains research objectives and reports on five research projects.Computation Center, M.I.T

Self-diffusion in granular gases

The coefficient of self-diffusion for a homogeneously cooling granular gas changes significantly if the impact-velocity dependence of the restitution coefficient $\epsilon$ is taken into account. For the case of a constant $\epsilon$ the particles spread logarithmically slow with time, whereas the velocity dependent coefficient yields a power law time-dependence. The impact of the difference in these time dependences on the properties of a freely cooling granular gas is discussed.Comment: 6 pages, no figure

Automatic generation of hardware/software interfaces

Enabling new applications for mobile devices often requires the use of specialized hardware to reduce power consumption. Because of time-to-market pressure, current design methodologies for embedded applications require an early partitioning of the design, allowing the hardware and software to be developed simultaneously, each adhering to a rigid interface contract. This approach is problematic for two reasons: (1) a detailed hardware-software interface is difficult to specify until one is deep into the design process, and (2) it prevents the later migration of functionality across the interface motivated by efficiency concerns or the addition of features. We address this problem using the Bluespec Codesign Language~(BCL) which permits the designer to specify the hardware-software partition in the source code, allowing the compiler to synthesize efficient software and hardware along with transactors for communication between the partitions. The movement of functionality across the hardware-software boundary is accomplished by simply specifying a new partitioning, and since the compiler automatically generates the desired interface specifications, it eliminates yet another error-prone design task. In this paper we present BCL, an extension of a commercially available hardware design language (Bluespec SystemVerilog), a new software compiling scheme, and preliminary results generated using our compiler for various hardware-software decompositions of an Ogg Vorbis audio decoder, and a ray-tracing application.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF (#CCF-0541164))National Research Foundation of Korea (grant from the Korean Government (MEST) (#R33-10095)

A New Biology: A Modern Perspective on the Challenge of Closing the Gap between the Islands of Knowledge

This paper discusses the rebirth of the old quest for the principles of biology along the discourse line of machine-organism disanalogy and within the context of biocomputation from a modern perspective. It reviews some new attempts to revise the existing body of research and enhance it with new developments in some promising fields of mathematics and computation. The major challenge is that the latter are expected to also answer the need for a new framework, a new language and a new methodology capable of closing the existing gap between the different levels of complex system organization

Approaches to uncertain or imprecise rules: a survey

With this paper we present a brief overview of selected prominent approaches to rule frameworks and formal rule languages for the representation of and reasoning with uncertain or imprecise knowledge. This work covers selected probabilistic and possibilistic logics, as well as implementations of uncertainty and possibilistic reasoning in rule engine software