Abstract

Abstract
Learning to program is hard. Students need to remain motivated to keep practicing and to overcome their difficulties. Several approaches have been proposed to foster students’ motivation. As most people enjoy playing games of some kind and play on a regular basis, the use of games is one of the most widely spread approaches. However, taking full advantage of games to teach specific concepts of programming requires much effort. This paper presents Asura, a game-based assessment environment built on top of Mooshak that challenges students to code Software Agents (SAs) to play a game, allowing them to test the SAs against each others’ SAs and watch a movie of the test. Once the challenge development stage ends, teachers are able to organize game-like tournaments among SAs. One of the key features of Asura is that it provides a means to reduce the required effort of building game-based challenges up to that of creating traditional programming exercises. © José Carlos Paiva and José Paulo Leal.

Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used to support monitoring activities in a wide range of applications and communication environments. Its usage in extreme conditions, in what concerns pressure, temperature, and humidity, must be carefully assessed before the network deployment. In particular, the temperature variations have a direct impact upon the behavior of WSNs through the batteries of sensor nodes. These electrochemical devices are highly susceptible to temperature variations, which modifies the offered effective charge capacity. In this context, it is difficult to estimate the behavior of batteries over time, impairing the extraction of relevant information for energy-aware approaches. Such information, particularly battery state of charge, voltage, and lifetime, is often used by WSN simulators to predict the communication behavior in different scenarios. Nevertheless, WSN simulators generally use simplistic battery models, causing significant deviations in simulation results when compared with actualWSN deployments. This paper describes the implementation of the Temperature-Dependent Kinetic Battery Model (T-KiBaM) in the Castalia simulator, which enables a considerable improvement of the accuracy of simulations in communication environments with different temperature conditions. An experimental assessment has been performed with temperature variations over time to validate the usage of the T-KiBaM battery model. The experimental results indicate that the T-KiBaM model is quite accurate when estimating battery behavior under both different temperature set points and different temperature variations.

Abstract
This work presents the design and analysis of a biological signal processing accelerator, including an interface controller and memory subsystem for a low-power CGRA. The controller design supports several operation modes, which can perform several applications when paired with the CGRA reconfiguration capabilities. Physical synthesis shows that the controller introduces only a 6 percent area and power overhead compared to the CGRA core, while allowing independent processing of inner loops at high frequencies and the exploitation of pipelining and parallelism. In-depth power analysis based on layout information was performed, including an evaluation of the use of power gating techniques. A practical case study (ECG signal processing) was also evaluated. © 2018 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract