Iterative partitioning and labelling of point cloud data

Over the past few years the acquisition of 3D point information representing the structure of real-world objects has become common practice in many areas. This acquisition process has traditionally been carried out using 3D scanning devices based on laser or structured light techniques. Professional grade 3D scanners are nowadays capable of producing highly accurate data at sampling rates of approximately a million points per second. Moreover the popularisation of algorithms and tools capable of generating relatively accurate virtual representations of real-world scenes from photographs without the need of expensive and specialised hardware has led to an increase in the amount and availability of 3D point cloud data. The management and processing of these huge volumes of scanned data is quickly becoming a problem.peer-reviewe

Distributed high-fidelity graphics using P2P

In the field of three-dimensional computer graphics, rendering refers to the process of generating images of a scene from a particular viewpoint. There are many different ways to do this, from the highly interactive real-time rendering methods to the more photorealistic and computationally intensive methods. This work is concerned with Physically Based Rendering (PBR), a class of rendering algorithms capable of achieving a very high level of realism. This is achievable thanks to physically accurate modelling of the way light interacts with objects in a scene, together with the use of accurately modelled materials and physical quantities.peer-reviewe

Novel attack resilience by fusing events related to objectives

Research in intrusion detection systems (IDS) is mainly restricted to the misuse and anomaly detection dichotomy, and therefore to their limitations. Web attack detectors are a case in point, where ones that perform misuse detection are prone to miss novel attacks, whilst those performing anomaly detection produce impractical amounts of daily false alerts. Detectors inspired from the workings of the human immune system (HIS) have proposed new effective detection approaches, however without tackling the issue of novel attack resilience separately from anomaly detection.peer-reviewe

Combining testing and runtime verification

Testing and runtime verification are intimately related: runtime verification enables testing of systems beyond their deployment by monitoring them under normal use while testing is not only concerned with monitoring the behaviour of systems but also generat- ing test cases which are able sufficiently cover their behaviour. Given this link between testing and runtime verification, one is surprised to find that in the literature the two have not been well studied in each other’s context. Below we outline three ways in which this can be done: one where testing can be used to support runtime verification, another where the two techniques can be used together in a single tool, and a third approach where runtime verification can be used to support testing.peer-reviewe

Real-time selective rendering

Traditional physically-based renderers can produce highly realistic imagery; however, suffer from lengthy execution times, which make them impractical for use in interactive applications. Selective rendering exploits limitations in the human visual system to render images that are perceptually similar to high-fidelity renderings in a fraction of the time. This paper outlines current research being carried out by the author to tackle this problem, using a combination of ray-tracing acceleration techniques, GPU-based processing, and selective rendering methods. The research will also seek to confirm results published in literature, which indicate that users fail to notice any quality degradation between high-fidelity imagery and a corresponding selective rendering.peer-reviewe

μLarvaScript : rethinking the Larva scripting language

polyLarva, the latest incarnation of the Larva runtime-verification (RV) tool suite, experienced a major redesign to its scripting language (used for specifying the monitors that carry out the RV.).peer-reviewe

μLarvaScript : rethinking the Larva scripting language

polyLarva, the latest incarnation of the Larva runtime-verification (RV) tool suite, experienced a major redesign to its scripting language (used for specifying the monitors that carry out the RV.).peer-reviewe

Rendering as a service

High-fidelity rendering requires a substantial amount of computational resources to accurately simulate lighting in virtual environments. While desktop computing, boosted by modern graphics hardware has shown promise in delivering realistic rendering at interactive rates, rendering moderately complex scenes may still elude single machine systems. Moreover, with the increasing adoption of mobile devices, which are incapable of achieving the same computational performance, there is certainly a need for access to further computational resources that would be able to guarantee a certain level of quality.peer-reviewe

Dealing with the hypothetical in contracts

The notion of a contract as an agreement regulating the behaviour of two (or more) parties has long been studied, with most work focusing on the interaction between the contract and the parties. This view limits the analysis of contracts as first-class entities — which can be studied independently of the parties they regulate. Deontic logic [1] has long sought to take a contract-centric view, but has been marred with problems arising from paradoxes and practical oddities [2]. Within the field of computer science, the holy grail of contracts is that of a deontic logic sufficiently expressive to enable reasoning about real-life contracts but sufficiently restricted to avoid paradoxes and to be computationally tractable. Contract automata [3–5] have been proposed as a way of expressing the expected behaviour of interacting systems, encompassing the deontic notions of obligation, prohibition and permission. For instance, the contract automaton shown in Fig. 1 expresses the contract which states that ‘the client is permitted to initialise a service, after which, he or she is obliged to submit valid user credentials and the provider is prohibited from increasing the price of the service.’ Note that the states are tagged with the deontic information, explicitly stating what actions are obliged (O), permitted (P) and forbidden (F) by which party (given in the subscript). The transitions are tagged with actions which when taken by the parties induce a change of state, with ∗ being used as shorthand to denote anything-else.peer-reviewe

Language extension proposals for cloud-based computing

Cloud computing can be described as the homogenisation of resources distributed across computing nodes, so as to facilitate their sharing by a number of programs. In some sense, the use of virtual machines in languages such as Java and Erlang, are a first step towards to this idea of cloud computing, by providing a common layer of abstraction over nodes with different characteristic. This has fostered various forms of distributed computing mechanisms such as web services based on remote procedure calls (RPCs) and code on demand (COD) applets executing in sandboxed environment.peer-reviewe