The SaS Seminars are a permanent series of open seminars of the Division of Software and Systems (SaS) at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA), Linköping University. The objective of the seminars is to present outstanding research and ideas/problems relevant for SaS present and future activities. In particular, seminars cover the SaS research areas software engineering, programming environments, system software, embedded SW/HW systems, computer systems engineering, realtime systems, parallel and distributed computing, and theoretical computer science. - Two kinds of seminars are planned:

• talks by invited speakers not affiliated with SaS,

• internal seminars presenting lab research to whole SaS.

The speakers are expected to give a broad perspective of the presented research, adressing the audience with a general computer science background but possibly with no specific knowledge in the domain of the presented research. The normal length of a presentation is 60 minutes, including discussion.

The SaS seminars are coordinated by Ahmed Rezine.

Recent / Upcoming SaS Seminars (2017)

SiLago: The Next Generation Synchoros VLSI Design Platform

Prof. Ahmed Hemani, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Kista, Sweden.

Thursday, December 14th, 2017, 15:15 room Alan Turing.

Abstract:
The VLSI design community faces the challenge of unscalable large engineering and manufacturing costs and 2-4 orders loss in computational efficiency compared to hardwired solutions. As a solution, SiLago raises the abstraction of physical design platform from the present day boolean level standard cells to micro-architectural level SiLago (Silicon Large Grain Objects) blocks as the atomic physical design building blocks and introduce a grid based synchoros VLSI Design scheme to compose arbitrary designs by abutting SiLago blocks to eliminate the logic and physical syntheses for the end user. The word synchoros is derived from the Greek word for space ? choros. Synchoros objects discretize space uniformly with the grid, the way synchronous objects discretize time with clock ticks. The synchoros design style and micro-architectural level physical design enables SiLago method to rapidly explore the higher abstraction design space and generate valid VLSI designs at GDSII level corresponding 10-100 million gate complexity in minutes with an engineering effort comparable to programming. The SiLago method also holds the promise to eliminate the mask engineering cost.

Bio of speaker:
Ahmed Hemani is Professor in Electronic Systems Design at School of ICT, KTH, Kista, Sweden. His current areas of research interests are massively parallel architectures and design methods and their applications to scientific computing and autonomous embedded systems inspired by brain. In past he has contributed to high-level synthesis and his doctoral thesis was the basis for the first high-level synthesis product introduced by Cadence called visual architect. He has also pioneered the Networks-on-chip concept and has contributed to clocking and low power architectures and design methods. He has extensively worked in industry including National Semiconductors, ABB, Ericsson, Philips Semiconductors, and Newlogic. He has also been part of three start-ups.

Challenges for dependable autonomous and cooperative driving

Prof. Antonio Casimiro, University of Lisboa

Thursday, November 30, 2017, 13:15 room Alan Turing.

Abstract:
Current vehicles are becoming increasingly autonomous and increasingly safe, making the automated driving vision a not so distant possibility. However, the known examples of fully autonomous cars are still very limited, and these examples require very controlled environments, imply performance restrictions or require the use of expensive technology. Concerning cooperative driving, examples are even more scarce. In fact, the move to connected vehicles raises several significant challenges to security and safety. This talk addresses some of the challenges in the way to autonomous and cooperative driving, with particular focus on those that may impair safety aspects. It also provides a perspective on a possible architectural approach to deal with uncertainty, when it comes to support cooperation. This approach was developed in the context of the FP7 project KARYON, providing means to handle temporal and value uncertainties in sensor data, communications and execution of complex functions. An example application is given, to illustrate the approach.

Bio of speaker:
Antonio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisboa. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science (Informatics) from the University of Lisboa in 2003. He is also a member of the LaSIGE (Large-Scale Informatic Systems Laboratory) research unit and of the Navigators group, where he leadd the Timeliness and Adaptation in Dependable Systems research line. His main research interests are in the area of dependable adaptive systems, focusing on architectures and middleware solutions for distributed embedded real-time applications. He was the coordinator of the FP7 KARYON project, providing solutions for safe cooperative applications in the automotive and avionics domains, and of the the CMU-Portugal TRONE project. Other EU projects in which he has been previously involved include HIDENETS (FP6) and CORTEX (FP5). In the last few years he has been teaching several courses of the Informatics Engineering Degree, including Real-Time and Embedded systems, Fault-tolerant Distributed Systems, Parallel Computing, Computer Architectures. Currently he is responsible for the Master courses on Programming in Distributed Systems and on Cyber-Physical Systems, as well as the undergraduate course on Computer Networks.

Executable UML: A language to define detailed and precise requirements models that can be run, tested and later deployed on diverse platforms without changing the models.

Leon Starr from Model Integration, San Francisco.

The slides are available here

Wednesday, November 15th, 2017, 13:15 room Alan Turing.

Abstract:
MBSE (Model Based Software Engineering) is increasingly accepted as an essential factor in the design of software for Mission and Safety Critical Systems. As it is currently practiced, MBSE spans a variety of modeling languages including Modelica, Dymola, Simulink and some variations of UML. In fact, UML is merely set of standard object-oriented notations and is not itself a cohesive modeling language. Confusion over this fact has led to a great many project failures and stigmatized software modeling in general. Leon will be presenting Executable UML, a true modeling language built upon strong mathematical foundations including first order predicate logic and set theory. This language is designed to precisely capture real world information, policies and constraints, essential synchronization and computations necessary to satisfy a system's requirements. Leveraging the power of math rather than ad-hoc object oriented design assumptions, nothing in the Executable UML models themselves demand any particular data storage, threading, tasking, computation sequencing model or coding philosophy (such as object-oriented vs. functional). Consequently, the resultant models can be executed, tested and then implemented on highly diverse software and hardware platforms without necessitating any changes to the models themselves. Furthermore, Executable UML uses a platform independent domain partitioning scheme to incorporate multiple modeling languages and non-modeled elements to define a complete system. SAAB is using this approach to integrate Executable UML, Simulink and other modeling languages in the Gripen-E. Thanks to the simplicity of its underlying mathematical definitions, there is a clear path from models to code, supported by a variety of existing open source model compilers.

Bio of speaker:
Leon Starr is the lead author of the recently published Models to Code (with no mysterious gaps) by Springer/Apress 2017. He has been developing real-time distributed and embedded software with object oriented, executable models since 1984. His models have been used in fighter jets, factory material transport control systems, ultrasound diagnostic and cardiac pacing systems, gas chromatography and semiconductor wafer inspection systems, video post-production systems and networked military battle simulators. He has taught numerous courses on executable system and data modeling to systems engineers and software developers worldwide through his company Model Integration, LLC (modelint.com) based in San Francisco, California. He is the author of the books How to Build Shlaer-Mellor Object Models, How to Build Class Models, Executable UML: A Case Study and assorted papers at uml.org and modeling-languages.com. He regularly assists project teams who model complex requirements and generate code from those models for challenging hardware and software platforms. Throughout 2013-2014 he worked with key engineering teams at SAAB to help develop models for the Gripen-E.

Writing, translating, and implementing stream programs

Dr. Jörn Janneck from Lund University, Sweden.

Monday, October 30th, 2017, 13:15 room Alan Turing.

Abstract:
Stream programs compute by incrementally transforming streams of input data into streams of output data, and are a common occurrence in a wide range of application areas, including signal processing, video and audio coding, cryptography, and networking. In this talk I will discuss the work going on in the Embedded Systems Design group at Lund University that attempts to provide support for creating and implementing stream programs on today's increasingly parallel computing platforms, and outline some of the research challenges we would like to address in the future.

Bio of speaker:
Jorn W. Janneck is a senior lecturer at the computer science department at Lund University. He received a PhD from ETH Zurich in 2000, was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, and worked in industrial research from 2003 to 2010, first at Xilinx Research in San Jose, CA, and then at the United Technologies Research Center in Berkeley, CA. He is co-author of the CAL actor language and has been working on tools and methodology focused on making dataflow a practical programming model in a wide range of application areas, including image processing, video coding, networking/packet processing, DSP and wireless baseband processing. He has made major contributions to the standardization of RVC-CAL and dataflow by MPEG and ISO. His research is focused on programming parallel computing machines, including programming languages, machine models, tools, code generation, profiling, and architecture.

sVote: a secure remote electronic voting system

Jordi Cucurull from Scytl for secure election managmeent and electronic voting.

Thursday, September 21st, 2017, 13:15 - 14.15, room John von Neumann.

Abstract:
Remote electronic voting systems enable elections where voters can vote remotely without geographical constraints using any Internet connected device. In order to be adopted, these systems need to provide confidence of their operation to voters and stakeholders. This is the reason why they have to fulfill a set of security requirements (e.g. voter authentication, vote secrecy and integrity, accuracy of election results, verifability, etc.), which are focused on 1) ensuring at least the same properties as traditional voting scenarios and 2) increasing the system verifiability and auditability. In this seminar we will introduce the main security requirements expected from a remote electronic voting system, we will explain the different types of verifiability (individual and universal verifiability) and we will give an overview of sVote, a secure remote electronic voting system implemented by Scytl, which has already been used in several elections. Both the voter's experience and the internal voting protocol of sVote will be presented.

Bio of speaker:
Dr. Jordi Cucurull is a researcher at the Scytl's Research & Security department. He contributes to the design of electronic voting systems and to the analysis of their security. In addition, he is doing applied research in the areas of electronic voting, trust and security in the context of several industrial projects. He is also involved in research projects with academic partners. Before joining Scytl, Jordi Cucurull, was a post-doctoral researcher at Linköping University in Sweden. His research was devoted to intrusion detection and mitigation applied to delay tolerant networks. He was also involved in teaching real-time systems, operating systems and green computing. Jordi Cucurull has a PhD in Computer Science from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His thesis was devoted to the mobility, interoperability, and security of mobile intelligent agents.

Deep Learning on Big Data Sets in the Cloud with Apache Spark and Google TensorFlow

Patrick GLAUNER from the University of Luxemboug.

Thursday, August 24th, 2017, 11:00 (sharp!) - 12.00, room John von Neumann. (A tutorial assuming basic deep learning backgorund is planned the same day kl 13-15, followed kl 15-17 by a talk describing applications of machine learning.)

Abstract:
Deep Learning is a set of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms that are inspired by how the human brain works. It allows to self-learn feature hierarchies from the data rather than modeling hand-crafted features. It has proven to significantly improve performance in a number of machine learnings problems, in a particular in computer vision and speech processing. In this tutorial, we will first provide an introduction to the theoretical foundations of neural networks and Deep Learning. Second, we will demonstrate how to use Deep Learning in a cloud using a distributed environment for Big Data analytics. This combines Apache Spark and TensorFlow, Google's in-house Deep Learning platform made for Big Data machine learning applications. Practical demonstrations will include character recognition and time series forecasting in Big Data sets. Attendees will be provided with code snippets that they can easily amend in order to analyze their own data.

Bio of speaker:
Patrick GLAUNER is a PhD student at the University of Luxembourg working on the detection of electricity theft through machine learning. He graduated as valedictorian from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences with a BSc in computer science and obtained his MSc in machine learning from Imperial College London. He was a CERN Fellow, worked at SAP and is an alumnus of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). He is also adjunct lecturer of artificial intelligence at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. His current interests include anomaly detection, big data, computer vision, deep learning and time series.

The Role of Visual Data Analysis for Data-Driven Science

Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz, Scientific Visualization group, ITN, LiU

Wednesday, June 21, 2017, room Alan Turing.

Abstract:
Technical advances in computing have enabled a revolution in Big Data also impacting the everyday work in scientific applications. Traditional scientific discovery that is mostly built on theory and experiments is more and more complemented by data-driven science. However, while data-centric science opens many unforeseen possibilities it is also a major bottleneck in today's knowledge discovery process. The increasing size and complexity of the datasets raises many new challenges for data analysis. In this talk I will demonstrate the role of visual data analysis in this context. I will discuss selected visualization examples pointing at the variety of concepts and applications in this field including interaction and exploration principles, abstraction of data and multi-level representations, distinguishing typical and outlier behavior.

Bio of speaker:
Ingrid Hotz received her M.S. degree in theoretical physics from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, and the PhD degree from the Computer Science Department at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. During 2003-2006 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization (IDAV) at the University of California. From 2006-2013 she was the leader of a research group at the Zuse Institute in Berlin, Germany. From 2013-2015 she was the head of the scientific visualization group at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Since 2015 she is a Professor in Scientific Visualization at Linköping University, in the Scientific Visualization group in Norrköping, and has an affiliation with the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV) in Linköping. The main focus of her research lies in the area of data analysis and scientific visualization, ranging from basic research questions to effective solutions to visualization problems in applications including flow analysis, engineering and physics, medical applications, and mechanical engineering ranging from small- to large-scale simulations. Her research builds on ideas and methods originating from different areas of computer sciences and mathematics, such as computer graphics, computer vision, dynamical systems, computational geometry, and combinatorial topology.

Dynamic Speed-Scaling: Theory and Practice

Prof. Carey Williamson, University of Calgary, Canada

Tuesday, June 13th, 2017, 13:15-14:15, room Alan Turing

Abstract:
This talk provides two different perspectives on dynamic CPU speed scaling systems. Such systems have the ability to auto-scale their service capacity based on demand, which introduces many interesting tradeoffs between response time, fairness, and energy efficiency. The talk begins by highlighting key results and observations from prior speed scaling research, which straddles both the theory and systems literature. One theme in the talk is the dichotomy between the assumptions, approaches, and results in these two different research communities. Another theme is that modern processors support surprisingly sophisticated speed scaling functionality, which is not yet well-exploited by current operating systems. The main part of the talk shares several insights from our own work on speed scaling designs, including coupled and decoupled speed-scaling systems. This work includes analytical and simulation modeling, as well as empirical system measurements on a modern Intel i7 processor, which we have used for calibration and validation of our speed scaling simulator. (This talk represents joint work with Maryam Elahi and Philipp Woelfel)

Bio of speaker:
Carey Williamson is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. His educational background includes a BSc Honours degree in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan in 1985, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1991. Dr. Williamson's research interests include Internet protocols, wireless networks, network traffic measurement, workload characterization, network simulation, and Web server performance. He is a member of ACM, SIGMETRICS, and IFIP Working Group 7.3. He served as SIG Chair for ACM SIGMETRICS from 2007-2011, and as conference chair for ACM SIGMETRICS 2005, WWW 2007, ACM IMC 2014, and IEEE MASCOTS 2017. He is also a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the new ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems.

Real-Time Scheduling of Mixed-Criticality Systems: What are the X Factors?

Prof. Risat Pathan, Chalmers University Of Technology, Sweden

Wednesday, April 5th, 2017, 9:00 (sharp)-10:00, room Alan Turing

Abstract:
Mixed-criticality (MC) systems consist of tasks with different degrees of importance or criticality. Correctly executing relatively higher critical tasks (e.g., meeting their deadlines) is more important than that of any lower critical task. Therefore, scheduling algorithm and its analysis have to consider runtime situations where the correct execution of higher critical tasks can be threatened by some events that I call ?X? factors of MC systems. Example of such an X-factor is ?execution overrun? which is pointed out by Steve Vestal in RTSS 2007. The purpose of my talk is to highlight another X factor: the frequency of error detection and recovery.

The design and analysis of real-time scheduling algorithms for safety-critical systems is a challenging problem due to the temporal dependencies among different design constraints. This work is based on scheduling sporadic tasks with three interrelated design constraints: (i) meeting the hard deadlines of application tasks, (ii) providing fault tolerance by executing backups, and (iii) respecting the criticality of each task to facilitate system?s certification. First, a new approach to model mixed-criticality systems from the perspective of fault tolerance is proposed. Second, a uniprocessor fixed-priority scheduling algorithm, called fault-tolerant mixed-criticality (FTMC) scheduling, is designed for the proposed model. The FTMC algorithm executes backups to recover from task errors caused by hardware or software faults. Third, a sufficient schedulability test is derived, when satisfied for a (mixed-criticality) task set, guarantees that all deadlines are met even if backups are executed to recover from errors. Finally, evaluations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed test.

Bio of speaker:
Risat Pathan is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. He received the M.S., Lic.-Tech., and Ph.D. degrees from Chalmers University of Technology in 2006, 2010, and 2012, respectively. He visited the Real-Time Systems Group at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA during fall 2011. His main research interests are real-time scheduling on uni- and multi-core processors from efficient resource utilization, fault-tolerance and mixed-criticality perspectives.

From C++98 towards C++17 and beyond

Prof. Jose-Daniel Garcia-Sanchez, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Thursday, January 26th, 2017, 10:15-11:15, room Alan Turing

Abstract:
C++ has now a long history and it is a highly used language in a wide range of application domains (videogames, finance, aerospace, embedded systems, scientific computing, to name only some of them). After a steady period in the last decade, in recent years we have seen a revitalization with the publication of two new standards (C++11 and C++14) as well as a number of additional technical specifications. The new version of the ISO C++ standard is scheduled to be published during 2017 and there are additional plans for evolution. In this talk, I will provide a view on the evolution of the language trying to highlight what are the design principles behind C++ evolution. I will illustrate examples of this evolution with features scheduled for C++17. I will also pay some attention to features provided in additional technical specifications complementing the main standard that we envision for the near future. Finally I will try to outline what could be the future of C++.

Bio of speaker:
J. Daniel Garcia is an Associate Professor in Computer Architecture at University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain since 2006. He has been serving as head of spanish delegation to ISO C++ standards committee since 2008. Before joining academia he worked as a software engineer in industrial projects in different domains including real time control systems, civil engineering, medical imaging, aerospace engineering, and high performance scientific computing. Since he moved to University he has participated in many funded research projects at national and international levels. He was the coordinator of the EU FP7 REPARA project aiming at refactoring C++ applications for parallel heterogeneous architectures. He also leads his university participation in the H2020 RePhrase project also related to better software engineering practices for parallel C++ applications. He has co-authored more than 22 articles in international journals as well as many other in international conferences. His research is focused on programming models for applications improvement. In particular, his aim is improving both performance of applications (faster applications) and maintainability (easier to modify).

Previous SaS Seminars

• 2016
• 2015
• 2014
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001

Page responsible: Christoph Kessler
Last updated: 2017-12-15