Stablility of Adaptive Real-Time Systems

We are surrounded by embedded real-time systems: our phone, car, whashing machine, and many more. Due to limited resources these systems often include adaptation mechanisms to trade-off performance for efficiency. Sergiu Rafiliu's dissertation determines conditions under which these adaptive real-time systems are stable, meaning that the system’s resource usage is controlled under all possible run-time scenarios.

The thesis explores whether resource managers used in such embedded systems are stable, meaning that the system’s resource usage is controlled under all possible run-time scenarios. Stability implies a bounded worst-case behavior of the system and can be linked with classic real-time systems’ properties such as bounded response times for the software applications. In the case of distributed systems, the stability problem is particularly hard because software applications distributed over the different resources generate complex, cyclic dependencies between the resources, that need to be taken into account.
Read more

Simulations explain your thoughts

Cognition is in many different ways grounded in the sensorimotor systems of cognitive agents. Henrik Svensson’s dissertation shows how it is possible to explain higher level cognitive abilities as simulated actions and perceptions, and also introduces a novel hypothesis of the role of dreams, during early childhood, in the development of simulations.

The thesis contributes by advancing the theoretical foundations of simulations and the empirical grounds on which they are based, including a review of the empirical evidence for the existence of simulated perceptions and actions in cognition, a clarification of the representational function of simulations in cognition, as well as identifying implicit, bodily and environmental anticipation as key mechanisms underlying such simulations. The thesis also develops the "inception of simulation" hypothesis, which suggests that dreaming has a function in the development of simulations by forming associations between experienced, non-experienced but realistic, and even unrealistic perceptions during early childhood. The thesis further investigates some aspects of simulations and the "inception of simulation" hypothesis by using simulated robot models based on echo state networks. These experiments suggest that it is possible for a simple robot to develop internal simulations by associating simulated perceptions and actions, and that dream-like experiences can be beneficial for the development of such simulations.
Read more

Stakeholder Engagement for Service Design

Fabian Segelström's PhD thesis "Stakeholder Engagement for Service Design" is the first one to be published on service design in Sweden. Service design as a practice has received much attention the past few years, with governmental organisations as well as private companies using the approach to help improve their services based on insights about the service users' needs.

Service design is a field emerging from the new-found interest in services as a design material by practitioners and academics of the human-centred design tradition. As such, the field can build on the knowledge from previous work in design as well as in service research. Introducing a new design material may however also introduce new challenges to practice. The research presented in the thesis investigates how the design research phase of the human-centred design process is affected by making services a design material.

It is argued that service design is a stakeholder-centred design discipline. The tools used in service design are to a large extent borrowed from other qualitative research traditions, but design-specific tools do exist. The information gathered with the tools for stakeholder engagement is then transformed into insights through analysis and synthesis. These insights are visualised to provide easily accessible representations of service situations.
Read more

Saab award to Patrick Doherty

The Åke Svensson research stipend this year goes to Patrick Doherty, professor of Computer Science at Linköping University. Patrick Doherty receives the award for his outstanding contributions to the development of autonomous unmanned aircraft systems.
Read more

Best paper award at ACM conference

The paper "Empowering the Creative User: Personalized HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming of Multi-path Nonlinear Video" was given the "Best Paper Award" in the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 workshop on Future Human-Centric Multimedia Networking (FhMN) and will appear in a special issue of ACM Computer Communications Review. It is based on collaborative work with University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and NICTA, Australia.
Read more

MIT ranks PhD from IDA one of the most innovative

Per Ola Kristensson, cognitive scientist from Linköping that received a PhD at IDA (Human Centered Systems) 2007 has by MIT Technology Review been listed as one of the 35 most innovative under 35 year of age in the world.
Read more

Best student paper award

ECSQARU 2013 Best Student Paper Award was awarded to the article "Chain Graph Interpretations and their Relations" written by Dag Sonntag and Jose M. Peña. The article covers when chain graphs of different interpretations can represent the same model and give a theoretical base for what probability distributions of systems that can be perfectly represented by chain graphs.

The prize was awarded (ex-aequo) and the article is published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer (Volume 7958, 2013).
Read more

Unique M.Sc. in Engineering created at LiU

A completely new master’s of engineering in software technology is currently being developed at Linköping University. The programme have over 600 applicants for the 30 positions and will start efter the summer. “There is no education programme like this in Sweden and we have been able to think in completely new ways,” says Fredrik Heintz at IDA who has lead the work on the new programme.
Read more

Prize for final year project theses 2012

One Bachelor and one Master level thesis were awarded by Swedish Computer Society (East) for best IT thesis in 2012. Bernhard Hahn did his thesis at IDA on analysis of algorithms for smart recipe suggestions on social platforms. Simon Tegelid and Johan Kihlberg were awarded the prize for map-assisted indoor positioning.
Read more

Software: security requirements and secure programming

In his PhD thesis, John Wilander studied how security requirements are captured before public procurement contracts, and treated aspects of code development, including static analysis, and run-time intrusion prevention.

Ben Livshits from Microsoft Research, a well-known profile within the area of secure software, acted as opponent at the PhD defence. The seminar was attended by a large audience from industry including several LiU alumni.
Read more

The Perfect Recommendation does not exist

How do we get service discovery systems to become become more user oriented and more accurate in selecting the right service for the right user? And more importantly: How do humans react to such a system if it on paper is perfect? Magnus Ingmarsson's PhD thesis "Creating & Enabling the Useful Service Discovery Experience: The Perfect Recommendation Does Not Exist" deals with these issues.
Read more

Exploiting Structure in CSP-related Problems

By relating complexity issues in constraint satisfaction problems to properties of graphs and their structure Tommy Färnqvist has in a recent PhD shown that a large class of applications e.g. in database search or AI do not have efficient solutions, thus not polynomially solvable. He has thereafter found a metric to relate problems that are approximation friendly.
Read more

Improving software security by preventing known vulnerabilities

In his dissertation, David Byers presents a method for process improvement that is intended to help software developers prevent vulnerabilities, thereby contributing to a long-term improvement in software security. The approach builds on the idea that modelling known vulnerabilities and their causes helps preventing them if the models are accessible in the software development process.
Read more