Programs as visual,interactive documents

We present a novel approach to combined textual and visual programming by allowing visual, interactive objects to be embedded within textual source code and segments of source code to be further embedded within those objects. We retain the strengths of text‐based source code, while enabling visual programming where it is beneficial. Additionally, embedded objects and code provide a simple object‐oriented approach to adding a visual form of LISP‐style macros to a language. The ability to freely combine source code and visual, interactive objects with one another allows for the construction of interactive programming tools and experimentation with novel programming language extensions. Our visual programming system is supported by a type coercion‐based presentation protocol that displays normal Java and Python objects in a visual, interactive form. We have implemented our system within a prototype interactive programming environment called ‘The Larch Environment’. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Smart Objects as Building Blocks for the Internet of Things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as near-field communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application.     

Sigmoid: a software infrastructure for pathway bioinformatics and systems biology

Biological systems encompass everything from immune and nervous systems to ecosystems. Systems biology, however, focuses primarily on unraveling molecular systems at the level of pathways and groups of pathways in a cell and its neighboring cells. Here we address the challenge of creating an expert assistance system for modeling biological pathways, using current software technology to decrease development costs and complexity. Our goal is to provide computational support to biologists and computational scientists who need to create and explore predictive dynamical models of complex biological systems such as metabolic, gene-regulation, or signal-transduction pathways in living cells.     

BiDMAP - A Biological Data Management and Analysis Platform

With the rapid development of biotechnology, more and more genomic and associated functional data are available. It is necessary and possible for biologists and bioinformaticians to integrate various databases in order to mine biological knowledge.Moreover, the complexity of huge amount of biological data and their complicated structure need an advanced management system which can store and manage data efficiently, and provide subject-oriented analysis tools for further study. BiDMAP is a platform designed to meet these needs. The core of BiDMAP is based on an Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS) which makes it possible not only to store and manage biological data but also to implement analysis tools on a single platform. The goal of BiDMAP is to integrate different datasets on specific subjects into one platform and provides a unified, easy-to-learn, easy to-use interface to access those data. Complicated data structures are viewed as objects, stored in the database and manipulated viastandard SQL. BiDMAP presents an intuitive approach for biologists with little computational skills and leaves the flexibility for further development. This paper gives an overview of the design and implementation of BiDMAP and gives a simple analysis example - finding interleukin candidates with implemented analysis tool of pattern scan.     

Embedded-TM: Energy and complexity-effective hardware transactional memory for embedded multicore systems

We investigate how transactional memory can be adapted for embedded systems. We consider energy consumption and complexity to be driving concerns in the design of these systems and therefore adapt simple hardware transactional memory (HTM) schemes in our architectural design. We propose several different cache structures and contention management schemes to support HTM and evaluate them in terms of energy, performance, and complexity. We find that ignoring energy considerations can lead to poor design choices, particularly for resource-constrained embedded platforms. We conclude that with the right balance of energy efficiency and simplicity, HTM will become an attractive choice for future embedded system designs.     

The systematic design of visual languages applied to logical reasoning

Visual languages are distinguished by a number of graphical objects and their relations, usually arranged in the two-dimensional plane. While objects and relations are syntactical containers which are used to represent some information, the question arises how to systematically treat all possible syntactical containers given the richness and complexity of the underlying geometry. This paper adopts the intersection paradigm applied in the context of spatial reasoning, which ensures the systematic identification of all conceivable well-formed diagrams. This allows the exhaustive analysis of a visual language. As an example, it is shown how this method enables a thorough understanding of the relations of the graphical elements of linear diagrams which represent monadic first-order logic. The consideration of indeterminate sets even demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach for a representation that includes a total of 512 relations.     

Model transformations in the UPES/UPSoC development process for embedded systems

Model-based development (MBD) aims at combining modeling languages with model transformers and code generators. Modeling languages, like profiles of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), are increasingly being adopted for specific domains of interest to alleviate the complexity of platforms and express domain concepts effectively. Moreover, system development processes based on automatic model transformations are widely required to improve the productivity and quality of the developed systems. In this paper, we show how MBD principles and automatic model transformations provide the basis for the unified process for embedded systems (UPES) development process and its unified process for system-on-chip (SoC) (UPSoC) subprocess. They have been defined to foster in a systematic and seamless manner a model-based design methodology based on the UML2 and UML profiles for the C/SystemC programming languages, which we developed to improve the current industrial system design flow in the embedded systems and system-on-chip area. This work is supported in part by the project Model-driven methodologies and techniques for embedded systems design and analysis based on UML, Abstract State Machines, and SystemC at STMicroelectronics, AST R&I of Agrate Brianza (MI), Italy.     

Implementing the expert object recognition pathway

Brain imaging studies suggest that expert object recognition is a distinct visual skill, implemented by a dedicated anatomical pathway. Like all visual pathways, the expert recognition pathway begins with the early visual system (retina, LGN/SC, striate cortex). It is defined, however, by subsequent diffuse activation in the lateral occipital complex (LOC) and sharp foci of activation in the fusiform gyrus and right inferior frontal gyrus. This pathway recognizes familiar objects from familiar viewpoints under familiar illumination. Significantly, it identifies objects at both the categorical and instance (a.k.a. subcategorical) levels, and these processes cannot be disassociated. This paper presents a four-stage functional model of the expert object recognition pathway, where each stage models one area of anatomic activation. It implements this model in an end-to-end computer vision system and tests it on real images to provide feedback for the cognitive science and computer vision communities.Published online: 4 November 2004 Correspondence to: Bruce A. DraperKyungim Baek: Current address: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA     

EMPIRE: Empirical power/area/timing models for register files

With the growth of the embedded devices consumer market, power efficient hardware is needed. Therefore power-aware architectural exploration is one of the most crucial design steps. For such an exploration procedure, it is important to accurately model the power consumption of all main components of the embedded system. Registers and register files are one of the highest power consumers of any programmable processor, but there is a lack of accurate and publicly available models. This paper provides such a power model for standard cell based register files for 130 and 90 nm technologies. The proposed model provides dynamic power, leakage power, area and timing information for register files in terms of key parameters like width, depth, activity, ports, and capacitive loading. It is shown that current models capture neither correct absolute nor relative trends present in register files. It is shown that some key, but often neglected parameters like switching activity, load have a larger influence in some particular sizes of the register files than others. Therefore, using the Empire model, accurate architectural exploration is possible.     

基于组件模型分析的组件容器产品线体系结构

组件容器为组件提供部署和运行环境,是基于组件分布式应用开发的核心.近年来分布式组件的多样化和快速演化对组件容器的开发方法提出了挑战.产品线工程是基于公共的核心资产开发特定领域内软件产品系列的软件工程方法,产品线体系结构是其中最重要的部分.进行组件容器产品线体系结构的研究能够提高组件容器的结构复用性,获得更高的生产效率和质量.由于组件模型是组件容器设计的基础,在领域分析阶段引入组件模型分析,提出了组件模型分析框架,通过组件模型元素到领域需求元素的映射,建立组件容器领域模型.提出了组件容器设计的基本原则,并根据变化性封装原则,提出了组件容器产品线体系结构PLACE,通过引入可选属性、模块层次结构和决策模型,实现组件容器的领域需求.PLACE产品线体系结构已在网驰平台的多个组件容器设计中得到应用.     

A Classification Framework to Support the Design of Visual Languages

An important step in the design of visual languages is the specification of the graphical objects and the composition rules for constructing feasible visual sentences. The presence of different typologies of visual languages, each with specific graphical and structural characteristics, yields the need to have models and tools that unify the design steps for different types of visual languages. To this aim, in this paper we present a formal framework of visual language classes. Each class characterizes a family of visual languages based upon the nature of their graphical objects and composition rules. The framework has been embedded in the Visual Language Compiler–Compiler (VLCC), a graphical system for the automatic generation of visual programming environments.     

An immune inspired co-evolutionary affinity network for prefetching of distributed object

In distributed object computing (DOC) containers, cache strategy as a passive approach improves the performance by caching the recently accessed objects. By the advent of large-scale enterprise applications of DOC, caching methods fail to keep pace with the increasing importance of performance and the increasing scale of DOC system. Prefetching is an effective approach to improve the performance. It generates and stores pages or objects in caches in advance, by predicting the requests. In the current DOC container, prefetching strategy is not supported and seldom studied in the literature. The immune system with faster secondary response and its affinity network inspire applying the immune mechanisms to build holistic model of DOC for performance improvement. In this study, a co-evolutionary affinity network (CEA-Net) is proposed for prefetching distributed objects. In CEA-Net, objects are antibodies and computation tasks are antigens. Invocation relations among object classes are modeled by the immune network of antibody genotypes. Multiple affinity measures among antibody, antigen, genotypes of antibody and antigen, genotype set and antibody population are defined to model the complex relations among distributed objects. Especially in the antibody population, immune principles including clonal proliferation, immune memory, immune toleration and elimination are designed to add evolutionary features to the antibody population. Based on CEA-Net, the prefetching architecture for DOC is built including 5 main procedures, Network Abstractor, Access Recorder, Object Factory, Cache Engine and Prefetch Engine. Finally, the experimental study shows the promising access performance and the evolutionary features of CEA-Net. CEA-Net is instructive for the future design of high performance DOC containers, such as WebSphere Application Server and BEA WebLogic Application Server.     

Managing Complexity in Large Learning Robotic Systems

Autonomous learning systems of significant complexity often consist of several interacting modules or agents. These modules collaborate to produce a system which, when viewed as a whole, exhibit behaviour that can be interpreted in some way as learning. In designing these systems, the complexity of the interactions of large numbers of modules can become overwhelming, making debugging difficult and obscuring the workings of the system when viewed from an architectural level. A way of controlling system complexity called the Layered Learning System architecture (LLS) has been developed, which offers the advantages of incremental development and testing, easier debugging and progressive upgrading facilitation. A hexapod robot has been implemented using LLS principles, with the main learning task being that of learning to walk as fast as possible without falling over.     

以决策为中心的软件体系结构设计方法

提出针对体系结构层次设计的决策抽象和问题分解原则,以及基于该原则的一种以决策为中心的体系结构设计方法.该方法从决策的视角对体系结构进行建模,并通过一个从导出体系结构关键问题到对体系结构方案决策的过程完成设计,还在其中实现了候选体系结构方案的自动合成以及设计决策与理由的捕捉.这种以决策为中心的方法切合体系结构层次的特点,降低了体系结构设计的复杂性和设计决策与理由捕捉的代价.     

Structure-Preserving Reshape for Textured Architectural Scenes

Modeling large architectural environments is a difficult task due to the intricate nature of these models and the complex dependencies between the structures represented. Moreover, textures are an essential part of architectural models. While the number of geometric primitives is usually relatively low (i.e., many walls are at surfaces), textures actually contain many detailed architectural elements.
We present an approach for modeling architectural scenes by reshaping and combining existing textured models, where the manipulation of the geometry and texture are tightly coupled. For geometry, preserving angles such as oor orientation or vertical walls is of key importance. We thus allow the user to interactively modify lengths of edges, while constraining angles. Our texture reshaping solution introduces a measure of directional autosimilarity to focus stretching in areas of stochastic content and to preserve details in such areas.
We show results on several challenging models, and show two applications: Building complex road structures from simple initial pieces and creating complex game-levels from an existing game based on pre-existing model pieces.     

CSCW委托授权模型的可视化建模

CSCW系统中用户和访问对象的数量逐渐增多,使得系统的管理工作日益繁重。委托授权机制能较好地解决CSCW中授权管理复杂的问题。为了有利于原型系统或实际应用系统的设计和开发,在面向CSCW基于角色一活动的委托模型RABDM for CSCW（Role-Activity Based Delegation Model for CSCWWJ基础上,利用统一建模语言UML（Unified Modeling Language）对其进行面向对象的可视化静态建模和动态建模。     

On robots and flies: Modeling the visual orientation behavior of flies

Although artificial and biological systems face similar sensorimotor control problems, until today only a few attempts have been made to implement specific biological control structures on robots. Nevertheless, the process of designing the sensorimotor control of a robot can contribute to our understanding of these mechanisms and can provide the basis of a critical evaluation of existing biological models. Flies have developed a specialized visuomotor control for tasks such as course stabilization, fixation and approach towards stationary objects, tracking of moving objects and landing, which are based on the analysis of visual motion information. Theoretical and experimental results suggest that in flies the visuomotor control for course stabilization as well as fixation and approach towards stationary objects may be implemented at least partially by one common sensory circuit. We present agents with a visuomotor controller that regulates the two behaviors of course stabilization and object fixation. To test this controller under real world conditions, we implemented it on a miniature robot. We have been able to show that in addition to course stabilization and object fixation, the robot also approaches stationary objects.     

Efficient pose estimation using view-based object representations

We present an efficient method for estimating the pose of a three-dimensional object. Its implementation is embedded in a computer vision system which is motivated by and based on cognitive principles concerning the visual perception of three-dimensional objects. Viewpoint-invariant object recognition has been subject to controversial discussions for a long time. An important point of discussion is the nature of internal object representations. Behavioral studies with primates, which are summarized in this article, support the model of view-based object representations. We designed our computer vision system according to these findings and demonstrate that very precise estimations of the poses of real-world objects are possible even if only a small number of sample views of an object is available. The system can be used for a variety of applications.     

Lump localisation through a deformation-based tactile feedback system using a biologically inspired finger sensor

The ability to localise harder areas in soft tissues is often desired during robot-assisted surgical operations. A deformation-based tactile feedback system was tested for the detection of objects within soft tissues, after being chosen over common pressure-based designs. This system uses a biologically inspired sensor that offers a new finger-like approach to tactile sensing. A tactile shape display developed from previous successful designs was used to output the sensed tactile information. Using the tactile feedback system on a mechanical teleoperated device, test subjects palpated a number of artificial tissue models to locate objects of varying stiffness. The addition of the tactile feedback system improved the detection of the objects from 64% to 98%, reduced the localisation error from 18 to 11 mm, and also decreased the time the users spent palpating the tissue from 55 to 37 s. This demonstrates that a deformation-based tactile feedback system can be used to successfully locate hard embedded objects within soft tissue, with a significant improvement over force and visual feedback alone. During testing, it was found that the users were able to more accurately locate the softest embedded objects compared to stiffer ones. Reasons for this observation are discussed.