HiPEDS Seminar: Building Computer Vision Systems That Really Work
2018-11-02 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | Huxley 342
Title: Building Computer Vision Systems That Really Work
Speaker: Andrew Fitzgibbon, Microsoft [<– note not MS Research]
Andrew Fitzgibbon has been shipping advanced computer vision systems for twenty years. In 1999, prize-winning research from Oxford University was spun out to become the Emmy-award-winning camera tracker “boujou”, which has been used to insert computer graphics into live-action footage in pretty much every movie made since its release, from the “Harry Potter” series to “Bridget Jones’s Diary”. In 2007, he was part of the team that delivered human body tracking in Kinect for Xbox 360, and in 2015 he moved from Microsoft Research to the Windows division to work on Microsoft’s HoloLens, an AR headset brimming with cutting-edge computer vision technology. In all of these projects, the academic state of the art has had to be leapfrogged in accuracy and efficiency, sometimes by several orders of magnitude. Sometimes that’s just raw engineering, sometimes it means completely new ways of looking at the research. If he had to nominate one key to success, it’s a focus on, well, everything: from cache misses to end-to-end experience, and on always being willing to change one’s mind.
Biography: Fitzgibbon is a partner scientist at Microsoft in Cambridge, UK. He has published numerous highly-cited papers, and received many awards for his work, including ten “best paper” prizes at various venues, the Silver medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the BCS Roger Needham award. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, and the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He studied at University College, Cork, and then did a Masters at Heriot-Watt University, before taking up an RSE job at the University of Edinburgh, which eventually morphed into a PhD. He moved to Oxford in 1996 and drove large software projects such as the VXL project, and then spent several years as a Royal Society University Research Fellow before joining Microsoft in 2005. He loves programming, particularly in C++, and his recent work has included new numerical algorithms for Eigen, and compilation of F# to a non-garbage-collected runtime.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/awf/

An IP provider’s perspective on functional safety
2018-11-26 16:00 - 17:00 | EEE Level 9 Seminar Room
Title: An IP provider’s perspective on functional safety
Speaker: Pete Harrod, Director of Functional Safety at Arm, Cambridge. Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Dependable Embedded Computing, Imperial
In this talk, Pete will briefly tell you something about himself, his time at Arm and what he does there now – and introduce his role as a part-time Visiting Professor and what he hopes to achieve in the 3 years that he will be doing this. But the focus of the talk will be on how an IP provider such as Arm can develop products that can be used in applications where safety is a key concern. By using ‘Connected and Highly Automated Vehicles’ (so-called self-driving cars) as an example, he’ll explain how the design and verification process needs to proceed to meet the requirements of safety standards and discuss the types of faults that can occur and how they need to be handled. By describing one of the latest Arm CPUs that support functional safety, he’ll show what can be achieved at the IP level. He’ll conclude with a look at future challenges and areas that are ripe for collaborative research.
Biography: Pete is one of the 12 founding engineers of Arm and is still there 28 years later, having taken on a number of roles in design, test, debug and now in functional safety. He is one of the UK experts on the working group that develops the ISO 26262 standard for automotive functional safety and is now contributing to a forthcoming standard on the ‘Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF)’. He has a PhD from UMIST , is a Fellow of the IET and is on the steering committee of the European Test Symposium.

HiPEDS Seminar: Symbolic Repairs for GR(1) Specifications
2019-02-15 14:00 - 15:00 | Huxley Building, Room 217/218, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
Title: Symbolic Repairs for GR(1) Specifications
Speaker: Jan Oliver Ringert, Lecturer in Model-Based Software Development in the Department of Informatics at the University of Leicester
Abstract: Reactive synthesis is an automated procedure to obtain a correct-by-construction reactive system from a given specification. Examples include GR(1), an expressive assume-guarantee fragment of LTL, that enables efficient synthesis of the software controllers of robotic systems.
Unrealizability is a major challenge for synthesis. Some works attempt to help engineers deal with unrealizability by generating counter-strategies or computing an unrealizable core. Other works propose to repair the unrealizable specification by suggesting repairs in the form of automatically generated assumptions.
We present two novel symbolic algorithms for repairing unrealizable GR(1) specifications. The first algorithm infers new assumptions based on the recently introduced JVTS. The second algorithm infers new assumptions directly from the specification. Both algorithms are sound. The first is incomplete but can be used to suggest many different repairs. The second is complete but suggests a single repair. Both are symbolic and therefore efficient.
Joint work with Shahar Maoz and Rafi Shalom within the ERC StG SYNTECH project that addresses challenges related to the change from writing code to writing specifications, and the development of tools to support a specification-centric rather than a code-centric development process. http://smlab.cs.tau.ac.il/syntech/
Biography: Jan Oliver Ringert joined the Department of Informatics of the University of Leicester, Leicester, UK in February 2018 as a Lecturer in Model-Based Software Development. Previously, he was a PostDoc in the Software Modeling group of Shahar Maoz at the School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Israel (12/2013-01/2018). Before, he worked in the Software Engineering group of Bernhard Rumpe at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (10/2008-11/2013). He received his Computer Science diploma (Dipl.-Inform.) from TU Braunschweig, Germany (2003-2008).
His research interests include model-based software engineering with a focus on software evolution and the software engineering aspects of synthesis of reactive systems.

HiPEDS seminar: Certifying Multicore Timing Analysis for Real-Time Systems
2019-03-29 12:00 - 13:00 | Huxley 217/218, 180 Queens Gate, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
Title: Certifying Multicore Timing Analysis for Real-Time Systems
Speaker: Dr Guillem Bernat, Rapita Systems
Abstract: The potential for increased performance by using multicore processors is not in question. Their use offers a solution to break the memory, power and instruction level parallelism (ILP) walls that prevent single-core platforms from meeting the increasing demands of modern embedded avionics software.
In the aerospace industry, adherence to safety guidelines such as DO-178B/C is expected. To adhere, applicants must show that software always completes operations within a specified time (commonly called the worst-case execution time or WCET). Approaches to calculate WCET on single-core systems are not directly transferrable to multicore systems, however, requiring the use of novel technologies.
In this presentation, we demonstrate a practical approach for calculating WCET on multicore platforms that is applicable to the DO-178B/C environment. This involves using high-quality timing analysis tools to understand the timing behaviour of the CPU by using “micro benchmarks”, and assessing the impact of interference from multicore resource contention by applying carefully-constructed “adversaries” that force high levels of contention.
Biography: Dr Guillem Bernat is the CEO and a founder of Rapita Systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Spain, in 1998 and then took a lecturing position at the Real-Time Systems Group at the University of York in the UK. In 2004 he founded Rapita Systems to commercialise technology for measurement based worst-case execution time analysis technology. Rapita Systems has grown to provide a set of software verification tools for safety critical systems including timing analysis, WCET analysis and structural code coverage to satisfy DO-178B/C and ISO26262 objectives. Dr. Bernat has more than 70 published papers in international conferences and Journals, has lectured extensively in real-time systems and is a frequent speaker at international conferences.

Seminar: Modernising Asychronous C++
2019-06-10 15:00 - 16:00 | Huxley Building 144, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
Title: Modernising Asychronous C++
Speaker: Lee Howes, Facebook
Abstract: In C++11, C++ finally officially discovered concurrency. The advent of an official memory model and atomic operations made possible what had earlier relied on implementation-defined behaviour. In C++17, C++ acquired parallel algorithms – a very basic subset of what OpenMP offers, but a start towards parallelism in the C++ standard. C++20 will get coroutines – finally in-language async/await syntax. The last few years has been a long mission in trying to define concurrency abstractions and a wider set of parallel algorithms. In this talk I’ll give a little history, some idea of why I and why Facebook cares about moving C++ into the future, and some idea of where we may take it.
Biography: Lee Howes did his undergraduate degree in DoC, and a PhD with Professor Paul Kelly in programming models for parallel computing. He spent 6 years working on the boundary of hardware and software, defining software acceleration standards in the Khronos Group and HSA Foundation, at various times editing the OpenCL and SYCL specifications and defining memory consistency models for GPUs and building cache architecture. He currently leads Facebook’s C++ language and libraries team, helping Facebook advance a vision of native compilation for large scale distributed, heterogeneous systems.
