Workshop Report: MICRO-9

Birds-of-a-feather sessions and a small workshop flavor were the dominant features of Micro-9, the Ninth Annual Microprogramming Workshop, held September 27-29 in New Orleans. Sponsored by ACM SIGMICRO and the IEEE Computer Society, this year's workshop drew 113.     

HotMobile 2008: Postconference Report

HotMobile 2008 presented a two-day program on mobile computing systems and applications. The authors report on the sessions on sensors, modularity, wireless, security, systems, and screens. They also report on the doctoral consortium held after the workshop.     

同行导师体验报告(英文)

Students at the University of Derby are required to complete a year in industry as part of their Bachelor of Science degrees.This is a daunting prospect for some of them,and they can be reluctant to engage in the process of finding a placement position.As part of a second year module,students seeking placement are paired with students already on placement in a mentee/mentor relationship to support the second year students in their search for an internship.This arrangement helps the mentees by introducing them to potential role models close to their experience,receiving encouragement from peers and the inculcation of belief that it is possible to find a placement.The mentors also benefit from a recognition of how much they have learnt.However,there are difficulties in establishing and managing the scheme which should be recognised.This paper reports our experience over the last three years.     

Discovering Patterns: An Industry Report

Design patterns are a relatively new topic of study in software engineering. As such, the ideas have yet to make a widespread transfer to industry. What may help are some early success stories that will complement the intuitively appealing idea of patterns, and provide more incentive for the skeptical, time-pressed, practising software engineer to explore them. This paper describes one such successful introduction of patterns into a real development project, and the ways in which they are affecting the ongoing course of the work. Some background material on the company and the project is given to provide context, followed by a discussion of how patterns were introduced to the project and which patterns were found to be especially useful. Along the way, observations about the nature and use of patterns are offered for further consideration.     

Benchmarking Innovation: A Short Report

A project is reported that benchmarked ‘best practice’ mature organisations, with a base in the United Kingdom, on the processes and practices that they perceive underpinned successful innovation projects. The majority of organisations had director level personnel involved in the innovation process but only three had active involvement of the top management. However, the majority saw the greatest level of innovation being obtained through the use of cross‐functional teams. Five key innovation supports were identified during the benchmarking exercise. These were top management support for, and involvement in the process; the appointment of an innovation champion or sponsor; rewards for innovative behaviours and ideas; and finally a positive attitude to building on creative ideas, irrespective of their source. It is suggested that benchmarking can play a role in identifying best‐practice innovation structures and procedures.     

Workshop Report: Fault-Tolerant VLSI Design

Contemporary integrated circuits contain as many components as the largest computing systems of 15 to 20 years ago. The age of VLSI is here, and its technology is presenting interesting potentials as well as challenges. The increased component count provides the opportunity for increased functionality and/or overhead such as built-in-test circuits or structured, top-down design methodologies. At the same time, shrinking device dimensions increase system susceptibility to small energy perturbations. For example, alpha particles from trace elements in packaging material have been observed causing "soft" errors in dynamic MOS RAM chips.