Cloud Computing is considered nowadays as the future of ICT systems leveraging new methodologies for developing, providing and consuming services. Even though many people believe that “Cloud” is just another buzzword for utility computing, this new computing paradigm is not only changing the design of modern computing platforms in technical level, but it also impels, from the market perspective...

Context-awareness is a key feature of Ambient Intelligence and future intelligent systems. In order to achieve context-aware behavior, applications must be able to detect context information, recognize situations and correctly decide on context-aware action. The representation of context information and the manner in which context is detected are central issues. Based on our previous work in wh...

With the increasing complexity of the emerging embedded real-time systems, traditional design approaches can not provide sufficient support for the development of these systems anymore. They especially lack the ability to trace and analyse real-time system properties. In this paper, we investigate the design difficulties for embedded real-time systems and propose several principles for coping w...

Inexpensive, three-dimensional vehicle simulators are important visualization tools that can enhance training and serve as low-cost platforms for testing mobility expert system algorithms. The moving vehicle simulator is an interactive. real-time system that displays a dynamic, three-dimensional, out-thewindow view of the terrain from any vehicle. The simulator has two modes of operation: stand...

| This paper describes the design, implementation and testing of a high speed controlled stereo \head/eye" platform which facilitates the rapid redirection of gaze in response to visual input. It details the mechanical device, which is based around geared DC motors, and describes hardware aspects of the controller and vision system, which are implemented on a recon gurable network of general pu...

We propose a cross-layer approach with tightly-coupled time synchronization for real-time support and predictable lifetime in battery-operated sensor networks. Our design spans a sensor hardware platform with hardware-based global time synchronization, a TDMA link layer protocol with collision-free multi-hop support and node scheduling algorithms for maximum concurrency and streaming. Our dual-...