Communications

The design of next generation heterogeneous computing platforms is facing new challenges: the scaling provided by Moore’s law led to hitting the “power wall” as well as to falling under the law of diminishing returns, for which density increase was not met by accompanying performance increase. The use of heterogeneous multiprocessor platforms, both in the embedded and in the high performance computing seems the right approach to be followed. However, a number of new directions at the design and at run-time are now open to be explored for optimizing the system both in terms of performance and energy efficiency: number and type of processors, use of dedicated accelerators, resiliency of the overall system, mapping of applications into existing cores, software application customization, etc. In this poster, we summarize our research activity in the optimization of fault-tolerant and adaptive computing platforms, as results of the participation in several EU and national projects focusing on the development of methodologies for the multi-objective design space exploration of multiprocessor system-on-chip platforms.

Supporting Rehabilitation of Disabled Using Industrial Robots for Upper Limb Motion Therapy. The innovative factors here will be to use the patient’s brain to control the rehabilitation robots, with series of the interactive 3D animations, games and entertainment, therapy programmes, and exercises to help patients actively and interactively involve in the rehabilitation process. The rehabilitation system will be developed using smart sensors integrated to the robotic platform. The system will have a knowledge base supplemented with soft computing techniques and self learning paradigms. The system will have capabilities for classification, clustering, diagnosis, trend analysis, scoring, prediction, optimisation, and decision making.

The new generation of media Internet envisages an ambient, content-centric Internet-based environment, highly flexible and secure, where people can work, meet, participate in live events, socialise and share experiences, as they do in real life, but without time, space and affordability limitations. To achieve this, integration of cutting-edge technologies related to 3D data acquisition and processing, sound processing, autonomous avatars, networking, real-time rendering, physical interaction and emotional engagement in virtual worlds is required. The challenge encompasses two aspects. First, adapting the latest 3D content creation software to create new tools. Second, how to utilise it within a social network environment.