Computer Engineering Commons^™

Reliable And Efficient Multithreading, Tongping Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

The advent of multicore architecture has increased the demand for multithreaded programs. It is notoriously far more challenging to write parallel programs correctly and efficiently than sequential ones because of the wide range of concurrency errors and performance problems. In this thesis, I developed a series of runtime systems and tools to combat concurrency errors and performance problems of multithreaded programs. The first system, Dthreads, automatically ensures determinism for unmodified C/C++ applications using the pthreads library without requiring programmer intervention and hardware support. Dthreads greatly simplifies the understanding and debugging of multithreaded programs. Dthreads often matches or even exceeds the …

3d Robotic Sensing Of People: Human Perception, Representation And Activity Recognition, Hao Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

The robots are coming. Their presence will eventually bridge the digital-physical divide and dramatically impact human life by taking over tasks where our current society has shortcomings (e.g., search and rescue, elderly care, and child education). Human-centered robotics (HCR) is a vision to address how robots can coexist with humans and help people live safer, simpler and more independent lives.

As humans, we have a remarkable ability to perceive the world around us, perceive people, and interpret their behaviors. Endowing robots with these critical capabilities in highly dynamic human social environments is a significant but very challenging problem in practical …

Exploiting Energy Harvesting For Passive Embedded Computing Systems, Jeremy Joel Gummeson

Doctoral Dissertations

The key limitation in mobile computing systems is energy - without a stable power supply, these systems cannot process, store, or communicate data. This problem is of particular interest since the storage density of battery technologies do not follow scaling trends similar to Moore's law. This means that depending on application performance requirements and lifetime objectives, a battery may dominate the overall system weight and form factor; this could result in an overall size that is either inconvenient or unacceptable for a particular application. As device features have scaled down in size, entire embedded systems have been implemented on a …