ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, Jun 18, 2020
In this article, we make the case for the new class of Self-aware Cyber-physical Systems. By brin... more In this article, we make the case for the new class of Self-aware Cyber-physical Systems. By bringing together the two established fields of cyber-physical systems and self-aware computing, we aim at creating systems with strongly increased yet managed autonomy, which is a main requirement for many emerging and future applications and technologies. Self-aware cyber-physical systems are situated in a physical environment and constrained in their resources, and they understand their own state and environment and, based on that understanding, are able to make decisions autonomously at runtime in a self-explanatory way. In an attempt to lay out a research agenda, we bring up and elaborate on five key challenges for future self-aware cyber-physical systems: (i) How can we build resource-sensitive yet self-aware systems? (ii) How to acknowledge situatedness and subjectivity? (iii) What are effective infrastructures for implementing self-awareness processes? (iv) How can we verify self-aware cyber-physical systems and, in particular, which guarantees can we give? (v) What novel development processes will be required to engineer self-aware cyber-physical systems? We review each of these challenges in some detail and emphasize that addressing all of them requires the system to make a comprehensive assessment of the situation and a continual introspection of its own state to sensibly balance diverse requirements, constraints, short-term and long-term objectives. Throughout, we draw on three examples of cyber-physical systems that may benefit from self-awareness: a multi-processor system-on-chip, a Mars rover, and an implanted insulin pump. These three very different systems nevertheless have similar characteristics: limited resources, complex unforeseeable environmental dynamics, high expectations on their reliability, and substantial levels of risk associated with malfunctioning. Using these examples, we discuss the potential role of self-awareness in both highly complex and rather more simple systems, and as a main conclusion we highlight the need for research on above listed topics.
IntroductionTelepresence robots (TPRs) are the subject of an emerging field of application and re... more IntroductionTelepresence robots (TPRs) are the subject of an emerging field of application and research that has recently received attention from various disciplines. Most of the relevant research has been done in computer science, while the interest from psychology and education has been relatively modest. Proximity plays an important role in personal interactions. Although human spatial behavior has been widely studied in social psychology, little attention has been paid to the spatial behavior of humans and TPRs.MethodsThe purpose of this paper is to present the results of a pilot study that investigated a certain aspect of spatial behavior – physical proximity or interpersonal distance – based on four social zones of interpersonal distance that characterize Western culture: intimate, personal, social, and public. The study conducted an experiment involving participants both in person and via TPRs, using the Double 3 TPRs in various simulated situations.ResultsAccording to the fi...
The interest towards using telepresence robots in a variety of educational contexts is growing, a... more The interest towards using telepresence robots in a variety of educational contexts is growing, as they have a great potential to enhance the educational experience of remote learners and provide support for teachers. This paper describes a study, examining the perception of Georgian university personnel about the use of telepresence robots in education. This exploratory research aimed to obtain evidence-based information on how the personnel (16 persons) from eight Georgian universities perceived the telepresence robots’ role in enhancing learning and teaching, and what challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats would characterise these robots. The results of the study revealed that the university personnel perceived telepresence robots to have a great potential to enhance educational activities. In addition, the participants indicated the major challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats, regarding integrating telepresence robotics into the teachin...
I hereby certify that I am the sole author of this thesis. All the used materials, references to ... more I hereby certify that I am the sole author of this thesis. All the used materials, references to the literature and the work of others have been referred to. This thesis has not been presented for examination anywhere else.
Power consumption in a synchronous FSM (Finite-State Machine) can be reduced by partitioning it i... more Power consumption in a synchronous FSM (Finite-State Machine) can be reduced by partitioning it into a number of coupled sub-FSMs where only the part that is involved in a state transition is clocked. Automatic synthesis of a partitioned FSM includes a partitioning algorithm and sub-FSM synthesis to an implementation architecture. In this paper, we first introduce an implementation architecture for partitioned FSMs that uses gated-clock technique for disabling idle parts of the circuits and asynchronous controllers for communication between the sub-FSMs. We then describe a new transformation procedure for the sub-FSM. The FSM synthesis flow has been automated in a prototype tool that accepts an FSM specification. The tool generates synthesizable RT-level VHDL code with identical cycle-to-cycle input/output behavior in accordance with the specification. An average power reduction of 45% has been obtained for a set standard FSM benchmarks.
Hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) is the model of the neocortex functionality, developed by Nume... more Hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) is the model of the neocortex functionality, developed by Numenta, Inc. The level of implementation does cover only the subset of actual neocortex layers functionality, but, however, is sufficient to be useful in different domain areas e.g. for a novelty or anomaly detection. Numenta provides their implementation of the HTM for commercial or research purposes as a software solution. The purpose of this work is to investigate the feasibility of implementing the HTM algorithm partly or entirely on FPGA, providing the suitable building block for the resource limited cyber physical systems. The uniqueness of the provided solution is based on resource efficient Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR) as connection address generators, as well as using a simple serial interface for inter-column communication.
In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analyt... more In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analytics is enabled by the introduction of appropriate sensing and actuation systems. The introduction of next generation of sensing and actuation systems or the Internet of Things era have been facilitated by affordable low-power 32-bit microcontrollers combined with low-cost and effective sensors with appropriate power supplies, mobile and local data collection (local big data) capabilities, adaptive behavior using machine learning and evolving model-based behavior, etc. While Cloud computing offers big data processing and actuation capability at the server level, mist computing offers data processing and actuation capability at the very edge of the network. Fog computing offers the same capability in the middle at edge gateways. Mist computing is an enabler for many applications, which cannot be realized with alternative methods, such as smart cities, where city streets adapt to the changes happening in the city, socially intelligent houses where indoor environment management is integrated with inhabitants health monitoring or military sensing systems where situational information is automatically deduced from raw data and delivered to the information consumers. While these visionary applications promise to change our environment and the way we interact with the environment we face serious challenges in the implementing these systems, such as reliability of data exchange between nodes and routers, power distribution, quality of decision making etc.
In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analyt... more In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analytics is enabled by the introduction of appropriate sensing and actuation systems. The introduction of next generation of sensing and actuation systems or the Internet of Things era have been facilitated by affordable low-power 32-bit microcontrollers combined with low-cost and effective sensors with appropriate power supplies, mobile and local data collection (local big data) capabilities, adaptive behavior using machine learning and evolving model-based behavior, etc. While Cloud computing offers big data processing and actuation capability at the server level, mist computing offers data processing and actuation capability at the very edge of the network. Fog computing offers the same capability in the middle at edge gateways. Mist computing is an enabler for many applications, which cannot be realized with alternative methods, such as smart cities, where city streets adapt to the changes happening in the city, socially intelligent houses where indoor environment management is integrated with inhabitants health monitoring or military sensing systems where situational information is automatically deduced from raw data and delivered to the information consumers. While these visionary applications promise to change our environment and the way we interact with the environment we face serious challenges in the implementing these systems, such as reliability of data exchange between nodes and routers, power distribution, quality of decision making etc.
2020 IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2020
Deep learning neural networks have gained much attention in recent research. Excellent results in... more Deep learning neural networks have gained much attention in recent research. Excellent results in various domains have proved the usefulness of such algorithms. However, training a deep learning network requires substantial computational effort; therefore, resource-constrained systems like edge devices in the IoT domain still lack full implementations, and training of the network is offloaded to the cloud. Online or unsupervised training of the network, on the other hand, is often a must if the system has to adjust to possible drift of the environment parameters or there is not enough data available initially. This paper proposes the first Xilinx Zynq FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based implementation of the contractive autoencoder (CAE), including training of the network.
2016 11th European Workshop on Microelectronics Education (EWME), 2016
This paper describes experiences obtained conducting the “Embedded Systems Design” course at Tall... more This paper describes experiences obtained conducting the “Embedded Systems Design” course at Tallinn University of Technology. After introductory lab tutorials, a complex Smart House project has been provided to the students. The students had to complete the project in a Start-up Company style environment, which demands planning, good teamwork, solid theoretical background, down to the ability to handle soldering tools. Special emphasis was given to low-power design techniques. Besides continuous supervision, the students' progress was carefully monitored, feedback collected and analyzed. Despite partial success on solving the problem as a whole, the commitment and cooperation yielded an acceptable integrated solution. The most valuable outcomes of the project work from students point of view were confidence and experience obtained from tackling development challenges of a heterogeneous and widely interconnected contemporary embedded systems.
ABSTRACT This paper describes recon.gurable logic in education at Tallinn Technical University (T... more ABSTRACT This paper describes recon.gurable logic in education at Tallinn Technical University (TTU) in the light of rapid changes of country’s economical structure and information technology environment.A logical set of courses has been introduced at every educational direction of Computer Engineering (CE) along with the set of design tools, prototyping boards and recon.gurable platforms.The courses, hardware and design tools, utilized for educating the field programmable logic and mixed hardware/software systems are described.
ABSTRACT This paper describes integer multiplier design optimizations for FPGA technology. The ch... more ABSTRACT This paper describes integer multiplier design optimizations for FPGA technology. The changes in partial product generator component enable to infer CLB fast carry logic for building Wallace trees. This change increases speed and gives better resource allocation.
Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA), 2014 Asia-Pacific, 2014
Reliable, standard-based networking is one of the key enablers for mobile and ubiquitous health m... more Reliable, standard-based networking is one of the key enablers for mobile and ubiquitous health monitoring. In particular, multi-hop IPv6-based wireless sensor body area network is one of the most attractive candidates for true internet of things in healthcare. This paper describes a proposal for a modular system comprising 6LoWPAN communication modules, optimized modules for application-specific sensing/digital signal processing, as well as energy harvesting and energy management modules. The connection between the modules is unified, enabling the creation of a wide variety of measurement setups. The unified DSP modules can be used to measure e.g. electrical bio-impedance, ECG, multi-axis acceleration, SpO2, etc. The DSP modules are integrated with low power, small size 6LoWPAN communication controller modules; IEEE 1588-2008/PTP is used for synchronizing the data acquisition nodes.
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, Jun 18, 2020
In this article, we make the case for the new class of Self-aware Cyber-physical Systems. By brin... more In this article, we make the case for the new class of Self-aware Cyber-physical Systems. By bringing together the two established fields of cyber-physical systems and self-aware computing, we aim at creating systems with strongly increased yet managed autonomy, which is a main requirement for many emerging and future applications and technologies. Self-aware cyber-physical systems are situated in a physical environment and constrained in their resources, and they understand their own state and environment and, based on that understanding, are able to make decisions autonomously at runtime in a self-explanatory way. In an attempt to lay out a research agenda, we bring up and elaborate on five key challenges for future self-aware cyber-physical systems: (i) How can we build resource-sensitive yet self-aware systems? (ii) How to acknowledge situatedness and subjectivity? (iii) What are effective infrastructures for implementing self-awareness processes? (iv) How can we verify self-aware cyber-physical systems and, in particular, which guarantees can we give? (v) What novel development processes will be required to engineer self-aware cyber-physical systems? We review each of these challenges in some detail and emphasize that addressing all of them requires the system to make a comprehensive assessment of the situation and a continual introspection of its own state to sensibly balance diverse requirements, constraints, short-term and long-term objectives. Throughout, we draw on three examples of cyber-physical systems that may benefit from self-awareness: a multi-processor system-on-chip, a Mars rover, and an implanted insulin pump. These three very different systems nevertheless have similar characteristics: limited resources, complex unforeseeable environmental dynamics, high expectations on their reliability, and substantial levels of risk associated with malfunctioning. Using these examples, we discuss the potential role of self-awareness in both highly complex and rather more simple systems, and as a main conclusion we highlight the need for research on above listed topics.
IntroductionTelepresence robots (TPRs) are the subject of an emerging field of application and re... more IntroductionTelepresence robots (TPRs) are the subject of an emerging field of application and research that has recently received attention from various disciplines. Most of the relevant research has been done in computer science, while the interest from psychology and education has been relatively modest. Proximity plays an important role in personal interactions. Although human spatial behavior has been widely studied in social psychology, little attention has been paid to the spatial behavior of humans and TPRs.MethodsThe purpose of this paper is to present the results of a pilot study that investigated a certain aspect of spatial behavior – physical proximity or interpersonal distance – based on four social zones of interpersonal distance that characterize Western culture: intimate, personal, social, and public. The study conducted an experiment involving participants both in person and via TPRs, using the Double 3 TPRs in various simulated situations.ResultsAccording to the fi...
The interest towards using telepresence robots in a variety of educational contexts is growing, a... more The interest towards using telepresence robots in a variety of educational contexts is growing, as they have a great potential to enhance the educational experience of remote learners and provide support for teachers. This paper describes a study, examining the perception of Georgian university personnel about the use of telepresence robots in education. This exploratory research aimed to obtain evidence-based information on how the personnel (16 persons) from eight Georgian universities perceived the telepresence robots’ role in enhancing learning and teaching, and what challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats would characterise these robots. The results of the study revealed that the university personnel perceived telepresence robots to have a great potential to enhance educational activities. In addition, the participants indicated the major challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats, regarding integrating telepresence robotics into the teachin...
I hereby certify that I am the sole author of this thesis. All the used materials, references to ... more I hereby certify that I am the sole author of this thesis. All the used materials, references to the literature and the work of others have been referred to. This thesis has not been presented for examination anywhere else.
Power consumption in a synchronous FSM (Finite-State Machine) can be reduced by partitioning it i... more Power consumption in a synchronous FSM (Finite-State Machine) can be reduced by partitioning it into a number of coupled sub-FSMs where only the part that is involved in a state transition is clocked. Automatic synthesis of a partitioned FSM includes a partitioning algorithm and sub-FSM synthesis to an implementation architecture. In this paper, we first introduce an implementation architecture for partitioned FSMs that uses gated-clock technique for disabling idle parts of the circuits and asynchronous controllers for communication between the sub-FSMs. We then describe a new transformation procedure for the sub-FSM. The FSM synthesis flow has been automated in a prototype tool that accepts an FSM specification. The tool generates synthesizable RT-level VHDL code with identical cycle-to-cycle input/output behavior in accordance with the specification. An average power reduction of 45% has been obtained for a set standard FSM benchmarks.
Hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) is the model of the neocortex functionality, developed by Nume... more Hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) is the model of the neocortex functionality, developed by Numenta, Inc. The level of implementation does cover only the subset of actual neocortex layers functionality, but, however, is sufficient to be useful in different domain areas e.g. for a novelty or anomaly detection. Numenta provides their implementation of the HTM for commercial or research purposes as a software solution. The purpose of this work is to investigate the feasibility of implementing the HTM algorithm partly or entirely on FPGA, providing the suitable building block for the resource limited cyber physical systems. The uniqueness of the provided solution is based on resource efficient Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR) as connection address generators, as well as using a simple serial interface for inter-column communication.
In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analyt... more In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analytics is enabled by the introduction of appropriate sensing and actuation systems. The introduction of next generation of sensing and actuation systems or the Internet of Things era have been facilitated by affordable low-power 32-bit microcontrollers combined with low-cost and effective sensors with appropriate power supplies, mobile and local data collection (local big data) capabilities, adaptive behavior using machine learning and evolving model-based behavior, etc. While Cloud computing offers big data processing and actuation capability at the server level, mist computing offers data processing and actuation capability at the very edge of the network. Fog computing offers the same capability in the middle at edge gateways. Mist computing is an enabler for many applications, which cannot be realized with alternative methods, such as smart cities, where city streets adapt to the changes happening in the city, socially intelligent houses where indoor environment management is integrated with inhabitants health monitoring or military sensing systems where situational information is automatically deduced from raw data and delivered to the information consumers. While these visionary applications promise to change our environment and the way we interact with the environment we face serious challenges in the implementing these systems, such as reliability of data exchange between nodes and routers, power distribution, quality of decision making etc.
In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analyt... more In real-time health analytics, smart cities, military sensing systems and others, big data analytics is enabled by the introduction of appropriate sensing and actuation systems. The introduction of next generation of sensing and actuation systems or the Internet of Things era have been facilitated by affordable low-power 32-bit microcontrollers combined with low-cost and effective sensors with appropriate power supplies, mobile and local data collection (local big data) capabilities, adaptive behavior using machine learning and evolving model-based behavior, etc. While Cloud computing offers big data processing and actuation capability at the server level, mist computing offers data processing and actuation capability at the very edge of the network. Fog computing offers the same capability in the middle at edge gateways. Mist computing is an enabler for many applications, which cannot be realized with alternative methods, such as smart cities, where city streets adapt to the changes happening in the city, socially intelligent houses where indoor environment management is integrated with inhabitants health monitoring or military sensing systems where situational information is automatically deduced from raw data and delivered to the information consumers. While these visionary applications promise to change our environment and the way we interact with the environment we face serious challenges in the implementing these systems, such as reliability of data exchange between nodes and routers, power distribution, quality of decision making etc.
2020 IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2020
Deep learning neural networks have gained much attention in recent research. Excellent results in... more Deep learning neural networks have gained much attention in recent research. Excellent results in various domains have proved the usefulness of such algorithms. However, training a deep learning network requires substantial computational effort; therefore, resource-constrained systems like edge devices in the IoT domain still lack full implementations, and training of the network is offloaded to the cloud. Online or unsupervised training of the network, on the other hand, is often a must if the system has to adjust to possible drift of the environment parameters or there is not enough data available initially. This paper proposes the first Xilinx Zynq FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based implementation of the contractive autoencoder (CAE), including training of the network.
2016 11th European Workshop on Microelectronics Education (EWME), 2016
This paper describes experiences obtained conducting the “Embedded Systems Design” course at Tall... more This paper describes experiences obtained conducting the “Embedded Systems Design” course at Tallinn University of Technology. After introductory lab tutorials, a complex Smart House project has been provided to the students. The students had to complete the project in a Start-up Company style environment, which demands planning, good teamwork, solid theoretical background, down to the ability to handle soldering tools. Special emphasis was given to low-power design techniques. Besides continuous supervision, the students' progress was carefully monitored, feedback collected and analyzed. Despite partial success on solving the problem as a whole, the commitment and cooperation yielded an acceptable integrated solution. The most valuable outcomes of the project work from students point of view were confidence and experience obtained from tackling development challenges of a heterogeneous and widely interconnected contemporary embedded systems.
ABSTRACT This paper describes recon.gurable logic in education at Tallinn Technical University (T... more ABSTRACT This paper describes recon.gurable logic in education at Tallinn Technical University (TTU) in the light of rapid changes of country’s economical structure and information technology environment.A logical set of courses has been introduced at every educational direction of Computer Engineering (CE) along with the set of design tools, prototyping boards and recon.gurable platforms.The courses, hardware and design tools, utilized for educating the field programmable logic and mixed hardware/software systems are described.
ABSTRACT This paper describes integer multiplier design optimizations for FPGA technology. The ch... more ABSTRACT This paper describes integer multiplier design optimizations for FPGA technology. The changes in partial product generator component enable to infer CLB fast carry logic for building Wallace trees. This change increases speed and gives better resource allocation.
Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA), 2014 Asia-Pacific, 2014
Reliable, standard-based networking is one of the key enablers for mobile and ubiquitous health m... more Reliable, standard-based networking is one of the key enablers for mobile and ubiquitous health monitoring. In particular, multi-hop IPv6-based wireless sensor body area network is one of the most attractive candidates for true internet of things in healthcare. This paper describes a proposal for a modular system comprising 6LoWPAN communication modules, optimized modules for application-specific sensing/digital signal processing, as well as energy harvesting and energy management modules. The connection between the modules is unified, enabling the creation of a wide variety of measurement setups. The unified DSP modules can be used to measure e.g. electrical bio-impedance, ECG, multi-axis acceleration, SpO2, etc. The DSP modules are integrated with low power, small size 6LoWPAN communication controller modules; IEEE 1588-2008/PTP is used for synchronizing the data acquisition nodes.
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