The introduction of computers into safety-critical control systems lays a heavy burden on the software designers. The public and the legislators demand reliable and safe computer control systems, equal to or better than the mechanical or electromechanical parts they replace. The designers must have a thorough understanding of the system and more accurate software design and verification techniq...

Evaluation is a key task in design, and a major goal in computational design is to develop techniques for evaluating designs throughout the design process, starting as early in the process as possible. We describe a computational technique for evaluating design concepts early in conceptual phase of engineering design. Conceptual design in engineering is abstracted as a function to structure map...

Endoscopic surgery as a less invasive method of surgery, is more di cult to perform. The associated problems are visual issues, hand/tool's movement, and force/tactile sensing. To overcome some of these di culties, in this paper new design concepts are reviewed and proposed such as tools with exible stem, suturing device, positioning stand, and robotic ende ectors for master-slave systems.

Recent advances in system design are presented. The shift towards flexible hardware architectures that can support a variety of applications via programmability and re-configurability is underlined. Essential to this process is the definition and use of platforms. We give an abstract definition of platform and show its use in system design drawing examples from the automotive system design field.

There is a significant body of research on distributed computing architectures, methodologies and algorithms, both in the fields of fault tolerance and security. Whilst they have taken separate paths until recently, the problems to be solved are of similar nature. In classical dependability, fault tolerance has been the workhorse of many solutions. Classical security-related work has on the oth...

In this chapter we examine several concepts related to local feature descriptor design— namely local patterns, shapes, spectra, distance functions, classification, matching, and object recognition. The main focus is local feature metrics, as shown in Figure 4-1. This discussion follows the general vision taxonomy that will be presented in Chapter 5, and includes key fundamentals for understandi...

1Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892; ZDepartment of Molecular Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63110; 3Department of Pathology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 PCR is a technology born of the modern molecular biology era. The enzyme used...

This qualifying dissertation is intended to review the state-of-the-art of Real-Time Database Systems under a uniprocessor and centralized environments. Due to the heterogeneity of the issues, the large amounts of information , and space limitation, we limit our presentation to the most important issues to the overall design, construction , and advancement of Real-Time Database Systems. Such to...

This paper proposes a novel reflective approach, orthogonal to the classic computational approach, whereby a system performs computation on its software architecture instead of individual components. The approach supports system’s self-management activities such as dynamic reconfiguration to be realized in a systematic and conceptually clean way and added to existing systems without modifying t...

This paper reviews selected recent innovations that expand the range of applicability of a number of new and emerging structural steel systems that can provide effective seismic performance. Focus is on recent developments on: (a) Steel Plate Shear Walls having light gauge infill plates; (b) Perforated Steel Plate Shear Walls; (c) Buckling Restrained Braced frames designed to meet Structural Fu...