By Assad Ebrahim, on March 19th, 2010
Topic: Technology-Advanced
The past five years have seen the emergence of a growing array of autonomous swimming, flying, and rolling vehicles, each highly sensored and capable of real-time communication with processors external to themselves. Practical designs are now commercially available for each of the four primary areas of our environment: terrestrial, marine (subsea, surface, and amphibian), atmospheric (gravity constrained), and space (orbital and planetary).
A look at a selection of these achievements in networked sensor systems will set the stage to discuss the communications layer of the ubiquitous computing stack.
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By Assad Ebrahim, on March 19th, 2010
Topic: Technology-Advanced
A Versatile Tool for Marine Operations, and a Portable Undersea Platform for Small Sensors
Micro-ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) are becoming increasingly capable even as their size and cost drop, opening up new possibilities for the application of undersea inspection, imaging, and measurement.
In this article, I’ll discuss four reasons why Micro-ROVs should be a routinely used part of a marine and water-side operations toolkit, and review some stand-out choices in the Micro-ROV category.
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… Integrating Sensors into the Ubiquitous Computing Stack
“Smart dust”, tiny leaf sensors, wearable computing — these and a host of other sensors that make measurements and communicate without requiring human intervention can now be readily integrated into dispersed systems to provide ambient intelligence, situational awareness, and the capability for adaptive behaviors or intelligent process automation.
Whether the sensor’s output is used to control the opening and closing of relays or thermostats, or to automatically raise alerts — the integration of sensors into systems is at the heart of the promise of ubiquitous computing. And with the ability to place hundreds of embedded sensors within a given coverage area, each wirelessly streaming information, the possibility of self-organizing sensor networks is increasingly becoming a reality.
This article takes a look at the sensor layer of a basic ubiquitous computing stack.
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The question of what value 0^0  should evaluate to has been discussed since the time of Euler (1700s). There are three candidate choices: 1,0, or “indeterminate” (i.e., throw an error).
In this article, I argue that the only reasonable choice (for discrete mathematics) is 0^0=1 ( ), and I’ll give a tangible, feel-the-grit-in-your-palms reason why it can’t be any other way.
There are important implications for software developers, in particular, the developers of various popular mathematical computing platforms have adopted differing conventions: R, Octave, Maxima, Ruby, Google, Excel, and various software calculators.
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…By virtue of its unbeatable low cost (free), ready availability for all three major operating systems, and its raw power in all areas of mathematics and analytic engineering, Maxima is a mathematical computing package that ought to be in the toolbelt of every programmer, engineering, scientist, and mathematician.
From garden-variety algebraic simplification, polynomials, calculus, matrix equations, differential equations; to exotic areas of number theory, combinatorics, hypergeometric functions; to state-of-the-art areas in tensor and gravitational physics, PDEs, and nonlinear systems, Maxima is a firehose of mathematical capability, able to blow through hairy computations with symbolic accuracy, leaving more time for the advancement of application development or research.
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By Assad Ebrahim, on February 12th, 2010
Topic: Software-Programming…for Embedded and Low-Level Systems Development
C provides the convenience of learning one language (a significant efficiency over assembly language), while retaining the ability to target a variety of platforms — from modern operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac) to real-time operating systems, systems-on-a-chip, and a host of microcontrollers for embedded development. And whenever you have to “mov” the bits around yourself (device drivers, DMA controllers), well, you can do that too…
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By Assad Ebrahim, on February 8th, 2010
Topic: Mathematics-Technical
By Assad Ebrahim, on February 8th, 2010
Topic: Mathematics-Technical(Discrete Mathematics Techniques I)
Abstract
We motivate an approach that uses recurrence relations to find closed form solutions to the finite-summation-of-integer-powers problem  for any individual  . The approach is illustrated for small :  . Maxima, an open-source (free) software package, is used to demonstrate how a symbolic computation platform can speed up the accurate derivation of messy algebraic expressions.
A recurrence solution to the general case (arbitrary  ) is developed in Part 2 along with Maxima source code. A direct (non-iterative) matrix method for solving the general case is given in Part 3 along with Maxima and Octave/Matlab source code.
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Good mathematical technique can bring the solution to certain mathematical questions within reach. By a proper formulation (one that is both tractable and that generalizes readily) and the use of mechanical techniques, one can often pass from a single insight to the solution of a family of problems, and in some cases, to the solution of the general question itself. … Good mathematical technique has built within it the mathematical insight of the best of previous generations.
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…For industry or research.
Over the coming months, I’ll be posting articles as part of a series on setting up a toolset for Mathematics work in industry or research.
I’ll be emphasizing open source software. Though the primary target is the Windows PC platform (dominant in industry), I will list alternatives for Linux/Unix.
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