This project involves using mathematical models to optimize the performance of a diffractive optical element. Unlike the usual optimization problem, we will seek methods for finding an optimal design in the presence of environmental variability. Sources of variability can include changes in manufacturing or operating conditions. The methods will be applied to designing a diffractive optical ele...

The Counterflow Pipeline (CFP) organization may be a good target for synthesis of application-specific microprocessors for embedded systems because it has a regular and simple structure. This paper describes a design environment for tailoring CFP's to an embedded application to improve performance. Our system allows exploring the design space of all possible CFP's for a given embedded applicati...

An automated modelling and control design environment for serial manipulators has been implemented in Matlab/Simulink. This development was motivated by the need for a fast and insightful modelling tool, given that currently available modelling environments are not well suited for control design. The manipulator configuration is defined within a graphical user interface and the corresponding ma...

The NewTies project is developing a system in which societies of agents are expected to develop autonomously as a result of individual, population and social learning. These societies are expected to be able to solve the environmental challenges that they are set by acting collectively. The challenges are intended to be analogous to those faced by early, simple, small-scale human societies. Som...

The Field Programmable Processor Array (FPPA) is a new reconfigurable architecture developed by NASA/GSFC and the University of Idaho under ESTO funding. When fabricated onto a processor chip, the FPPA architecture promises high-throughput, radiationtolerant, low-power data processing, for spacecraft instruments [1]. The FPPA implements a synchronous fixed-point data flow computational model, w...

The Framework for Interdisciplinary Design Optimization (FIDO) project has the goal of developing a general distributed computing system for executing multidisciplinary computations on a networked heterogeneous cluster of workstations and vector and massively parallel computers. The concept being used for FIDO is course-grained parallelism, with instances of disciplinary codes (aerodynamics, st...

The research in wireless communications and in-vehicle computing systems has opened up new fields of applications for transportation systems. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) emerge as a contribution to the solution of providing safer and more efficient roads and to increase passenger safety. This thesis treats different issues that influence the performance of wireless vehicle communication ...

Efficient knowledge sharing and reuse—a pre-requisite for the realization of the Semantic Web vision—is currently impeded by the lack of standards for documenting and annotating ontologies with metadata information. We argue that the availability of metadata is a fundamental dimension of ontology reusability. Metadata information provides a basis for ontology developers to evaluate and adapt ex...

Using FPGAs to accelerate High Performance Computing (HPC) applications is attractive, but has a huge associated cost: the time spent, not for developing efficient FPGA code but for handling interfaces between CPUs and FPGAs. The usual difficulties are the discovery of interface libraries and tools, and the selection of methods to debug and optimize the communications. Our GALS (Globally Asynch...