WSN Design Contest 2015

Today was the day of the WSN Design Contest 2015. Actually, the contest is still taking place as I write this, but we already have winners! For the first time ever, one of the groups finished the challenge with plenty of time to spare (they did it in about 1h40!)

Below, the winning group and their prize.

They now join the gallery of winning teams of each year: 2014, 2012, 2011 and 2010 (in 2013, no group managed to finish the challenge). 

The contest is part of my EMBS undergraduate module: all students are divided in groups, are given a few WSN motes and programming boards, and must design, test and implement a simple multihop wireless communication protocol over IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer in order to transmit a packet from the labs to my office, all within a 2 hours practical lecture slot. The winner team gets a box of chocolates, and are immortalised with their picture in this blog.

First batch of PhDs

The year of 2014 was the year I graduated my first doctoral students in York. Previously I had co-supervised the PhDs of Luciano Ost (at PUCRS, with Fernando Moraes as the main supervisor) and Leandro Moeller (at TU Darmstadt, with Manfred Glesner as the main supervisor). Now, with all their degrees issued and their theses approved and published at the White Rose e-Theses repository, I'm glad to present my first batch of Yorkies:

Ipek Caliskanelli: A Bio-inspired Load Balancing Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

Andrew Burkimsher: Fair, responsive scheduling of engineering workflows on computing grids (co-supervised with Iain Bate)

M. Norazizi Sham Mohd Sayuti: Early Design Space Exploration of Hard Real-Time Embedded Networks-on-Chip

The three research topics reflect very well my portfolio, as they apply different resource allocation techniques to different computational platforms (sensor networks, high performance grids and on-chip multiprocessors, respectively) to achieve critical non-fuctional properties related to time and energy dissipation.

And it is great to know they all went on to promising academic careers. Ipek is now a post-doc researcher at the University of Liverpool, Azizi returned to his permanent position at the University Sains Islam in Malaysia, and Andrew has continued as a post-doc here with us working in the DreamCloud project.

Edible paper

Today my PhD students and postdocs surprised me at the RTS group meeting with a birthday cake in the form of a research paper, IEEE style and everything.

Here's a photo of the cake:

And here is a link to the PDF version of the paper, which I heard went through several rounds of review by the students and postdocs.

Below, some pictures of me cutting the cake and distributing to the Real-Time Systems Group folks.

Thank you very much, everyone! I really appreciated the surprise and all the creativity that went into the paper writing (and baking!)

Random news

Some news that I should have announced earlier here:

• The book on Embedded Systems Design that I have edited jointly with Alessandra Bagnato, Imran Quadri and Matteo Rossi has been published by IGI Global. It provides insights from the computer science community on integrated systems research projects taking place in the European region. It covers a diverse range of design principles covered by these projects, from specification at high abstraction levels using standards such as UML and related profiles to intermediate design phases.

• My PhD student Bharath Sudev has received two awards in 2014. First, he received the best paper award at ReCoSoC 2014, with his paper on "Low overhead predictability enhancement in non-preemptive network-on-chip routers using Priority Forwarded Packet Splitting". Then, he received the best presentation award at the YDS 2014 with a talk on "Dynamic Time Multiplexed Virtual Channels, a Performance Scalable Approach in Network-On-Chip Routers to Reduce Packet Starvation". Congratulations to Bharath, the awards look good at the RTS award gallery.