Abstract

Abstract
Software developers have always found it difficult to adopt Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as computing platforms. Recent advances in HLS tools aim to ease the mapping of computations to FPGAs by abstracting the hardware design effort via a standard OpenCL interface and execution model. However, OpenCL is a low-level programming language and requires that developers master the target architecture in order to achieve efficient results. Thus, efforts addressing the generation of OpenCL from high-level languages are of paramount importance to increase design productivity and to help software developers. Existing approaches bridge this by translating MATLAB/Octave code into C, or similar languages, in order to improve performance by efficiently compiling for the target hardware. One example is the MATISSE source-to-source compiler, which translates MATLAB code into standard-compliant C and/or OpenCL code. In this paper, we analyse the viability of combining both flows so that sections of MATLAB code can be translated to specialized hardware with a small amount of effort, and test a few code optimizations and their effect on performance. We present preliminary results relative to execution times, and resource and power consumption, for two OpenCL kernels generated by MATISSE, and manual optimizations of each kernel based on different coding techniques. © 2018 The authors and IOS Press.

Abstract
Research data are the cornerstone of science and their current fast rate of production is disquieting researchers. Adequate research data management strongly depends on accurate metadata records that capture the production context of the datasets, thus enabling data interpretation and reuse. This chapter reports on the authors' experience in the development of the metadata models, formalized as ontologies, for several research domains, involving members from small research teams in the overall process. This process is instantiated with four case studies: vehicle simulation; hydrogen production; biological oceanography and social sciences. The authors also present a data description workflow that includes a research data management platform, named Dendro, where researchers can prepare their datasets for further deposit in external data repositories. © 2017, IGI Global.

Abstract
Developing robust and universal methods for unsupervised segmentation of moving objects in video sequences has proved to be a hard and challenging task. The best solutions are, in general, computationally heavy preventing their use in real-time applications. This research addresses this problem by proposing a robust and computationally efficient method, BMOG, that significantly boosts the performance of the widely used MOG2 method. The complexity of BMOG is kept low, proving its suitability for real-time applications. The proposed solution explores a novel classification mechanism that combines color space discrimination capabilities with hysteresis and a dynamic learning rate for background model update.

Abstract

Abstract
Location-based games require, among other things, physical activity and real-world context. Additionally, ensuring that the players are assigned challenges that are adequate and safe for the current context (both physical and spatial) is also important, as it can improve both the gaming experience and the outcomes of the exercise. However, the impact adaptivity has in the specific case of location-based exergames still has not been researched in depth. In this paper, we present a location-based exergame capable of adapting its mechanics to the current context.