System on chips designs have evolved from fairly simple unicore, single memory designs to complex heterogeneous multicore SoC architectures consisting of a large number of IP blocks on the same silicon. To meet high computational demands posed by latest consumer electronic devices, most current systems are based on such paradigm, which represents a real revolution in many aspects in computing. The attraction of multicore processing for power reduction is compelling. By splitting a set of tasks among multiple processor cores, the operating frequency necessary for each core can be reduced, allowing to reduce the voltage on each core. Because dynamic power is proportional to the frequency and to the square of the voltage, we get a big gain, even though we may have more cores running. As more and more cores are integrated into these designs to share the ever increasing processing load, the main challenges lie in efficient memory hierarchy, scalable system interconnect, new programming paradigms, and efficient integration methodology for connecting such heterogeneous cores into a single system capable of leveraging their individual flexibility. Current design methods tend toward mixed HW/SW co-designs targeting multicore systems on-chip for specific applications. To decide on the lowest cost mix of cores, designers must iteratively map the device’s functionality to a particular HW/SW partition and target architectures. In addition, to connect the heterogeneous cores, the architecture requires high performance complex communication architectures and efficient communication protocols, such as hierarchical bus, point-to-point connection, or Network-on-Chip. Software development also becomes far more complex due to the difficulties in breaking a single processing task into multiple parts that can be processed separately and then reassembled later. This reflects the fact that certain processor jobs cannot be easily parallelized to run concurrently on multiple processing cores and that load balancing between processing cores – especially heterogeneous cores – is very difficult.

Conventional on-chip communication design mostly use ad-hoc approaches that fail to meet the challenges posed by the next-generation MultiCore Systems on-chip (MCSoC) designs. These major challenges include wiring delay, predictability, diverse interconnection architectures, and power dissipation. A Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm is emerging as the solution for the problems of interconnecting dozens of cores into a single system on-chip. However, there are many problems associated with the design of such systems. These problems arise from non-scalable global wire delays, failure to achieve global synchronization, and difficulties associated with non-scalable bus-based functional interconnects. The book consists of three parts, with each part being subdivided into four chapters. The first part deals with design and methodology issues. The architectures used in conventional methods of MCSoCs design and custom multiprocessor architectures are not flexible enough to meet the requirements of different application domains and not scalable enough to meet different computation needs and different complexities of various applications. Several chapters of the first part will emphasize on the design techniques and methodologies. The second part covers the most critical part of MCSoCs design — the interconnections. One approach to addressing the design methodologies is to adopt the so-called reusability feature to boost design productivity. In the past years, the primitive design units evolved from transistors to gates, finite state machines, and processor cores. The network-on-chip paradigm offers this attractive property for the future and will be able to close the productivity gap. The last part of this book delves into MCSoCs validations and optimizations. A more qualitative approach of system validation is based on the use of formal techniques for hardware design. The main advantage of formal methods is the possibility to prove the validity of essential design requirements. As formal languages have a mathematical foundation, it is possible to formally extract and verify these desired properties of the complete abstract state space. Online testing techniques for identifying faults that can lead to system failure are also surveyed. Emphasis is given to analytical redundancy-based techniques that have been developed for fault detection and isolation in the automatic control area.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, ARC 2018, held in Santorini, Greece, in May 2018. The 29 full papers and 22 short presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. In addition, the volume contains 9 contributions from research projects. The papers were organized in topical sections named: machine learning and neural networks; FPGA-based design and CGRA optimizations; applications and surveys; fault-tolerance, security and communication architectures; reconfigurable and adaptive architectures; design methods and fast prototyping; FPGA-based design and applications; and special session: research projects.

This publication examines complex performance evaluation of various typical parallel algorithms (shared memory, distributed memory) and their practical implementations. As real application examples we demonstrate the various influences during the process of modelling and performance evaluation and the consequences of their distributed parallel implementations.

Human action analyses and recognition are challenging problems due to large variations in human motion and appearance, camera viewpoint and environment settings. The field of action and activity representation and recognition is relatively old, yet not well-understood by the students and research community. Some important but common motion recognition problems are even now unsolved properly by the computer vision community. However, in the last decade, a number of good approaches are proposed and evaluated subsequently by many researchers. Among those methods, some methods get significant attention from many researchers in the computer vision field due to their better robustness and performance. This book will cover gap of information and materials on comprehensive outlook – through various strategies from the scratch to the state-of-the-art on computer vision regarding action recognition approaches. This book will target the students and researchers who have knowledge on image processing at a basic level and would like to explore more on this area and do research. The step by step methodologies will encourage one to move forward for a comprehensive knowledge on computer vision for recognizing various human actions.

Trustworthy Ubiquitous Computing covers aspects of trust in ubiquitous computing environments. The aspects of context, privacy, reliability, usability and user experience related to “emerged and exciting new computing paradigm of Ubiquitous Computing”, includes pervasive, grid, and peer-to-peer computing including sensor networks to provide secure computing and communication services at anytime and anywhere. Marc Weiser presented his vision of disappearing and ubiquitous computing more than 15 years ago. The big picture of the computer introduced into our environment was a big innovation and the starting point for various areas of research. In order to totally adopt the idea of ubiquitous computing several houses were build, equipped with technology and used as laboratory in order to find and test appliances that are useful and could be made available in our everyday life. Within the last years industry picked up the idea of integrating ubiquitous computing and already available products like remote controls for your house were developed and brought to the market. In spite of many applications and projects in the area of ubiquitous and pervasive computing the success is still far away. One of the main reasons is the lack of acceptance of and confidence in this technology. Although researchers and industry are working in all of these areas a forum to elaborate security, reliability and privacy issues, that resolve in trustworthy interfaces and computing environments for people interacting within these ubiquitous environments is important. The user experience factor of trust thus becomes a crucial issue for the success of a UbiComp application. The goal of this book is to provide a state the art of Trustworthy Ubiquitous Computing to address recent research results and to present and discuss the ideas, theories, technologies, systems, tools, applications and experiences on all theoretical and practical issues.

This book consists of a number of chapters addressing different aspects of activity recognition, roughly in three main categories of topics. The first topic will be focused on activity modeling, representation and reasoning using mathematical models, knowledge representation formalisms and AI techniques. The second topic will concentrate on activity recognition methods and algorithms. Apart from traditional methods based on data mining and machine learning, we are particularly interested in novel approaches, such as the ontology-based approach, that facilitate data integration, sharing and automatic/automated processing. In the third topic we intend to cover novel architectures and frameworks for activity recognition, which are scalable and applicable to large scale distributed dynamic environments. In addition, this topic will also include the underpinning technological infrastructure, i.e. tools and APIs, that supports function/capability sharing and reuse, and rapid development and deployment of technological solutions. The fourth category of topic will be dedicated to representative applications of activity recognition in intelligent environments, which address the life cycle of activity recognition and their use for novel functions of the end-user systems with comprehensive implementation, prototyping and evaluation. This will include a wide range of application scenarios, such as smart homes, intelligent conference venues and cars.

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