Ns-2.33 (and nam) on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)
Why Learning Assembly is Still Important for CS Undergrads
December 2nd, 2009 by Jason Ernst
This past semester I had the privilege of assisting in an undergraduate assembly language class. From my experience in my undergrad years, I found this class quite challenging since it was much different from other CS classes I had encountered up until this point. Errors from the assembler / emulator are often more cryptic that we are used to encountering. If you are lucky enough to work with a development board (which I wasn’t when I took the class myself at another school) you may not get much error feedback other than the equivalent of a windows BSOD from the board.
Posted in Computer Science, Education by Jason Ernst
Coast-to-Coast Seminars
October 20th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
Today I found out about some cross-Canada computer / math seminars that are sponsored by a consortium of research / computing organizations across Canada including SHARCNET, WestGrid, ACENet, IRMACS and AARMS. Today’s talk was given at the University of Toronto by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton (see the SHARCNET site for a description / abstract). The first part of the talk showed a network learning how to recognize written characters. The approach was unique (at least to what I’ve encountered in my soft computing class) in that it didn’t assign and back-propagate the labels from the start. The network learned “features” based on the input patterns and then assigned the labels after the pattern had been learned. The coolest feature was being able to “visualize what the network is thinking” by doing the process sort of in reverse. The second part of the talk applied a similar technique to the motion of person wearing sensors. The network could be trained to recognize the style of motion of the person and then from that, new styles of walking could be “imagined” by the network. For example the network could image the person changing walking styles midwalk through the visualization even though it hadn’t been trained in this way. In all it was very interesting. It would be fun to try to apply some of these techniques to wireless networks. Perhaps the motion modeling could be applied to mobile wireless devices to help with hand-offs?
Anyway, if anyone is interested and you are at one of the Universities which is a part of the groups putting these on, they happen every other week. You can see at schedule at the SHARCNET website, or probably at the group you are a part of at your school. As far as I know, anyone can attend!
Posted in Computer Science, Research by Jason Ernst
ANN for Wireless Network Applications
September 28th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
This semester I have been taking a soft computing course. We have covered fuzzy logic and are starting artificial neural networks (ANN) although I have missed a couple of classes due to the conferences I have been attending. Anyway the ANN class today piqued my interest in how I can apply this to my area which is wireless networks. It seems to me so far that it could be applied to some of my cross-layer work since the network could be trained to tune parameters to settings which yield good performance based on specific network conditions. However, I’m not sure if this approach would be good or if some other AI type of technique may be better. Also I am interested in how ANNs could be applied to breaking encryption schemes if it is even possible. I have tried a few searches on Google and some journals / conferences but nothing of interest has come up yet. I don’t think I really understand ANNs enough to answer any of the questions, but I thought I’d get them down so I can come back later and think when I have more time. Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions on these ideas.
Posted in Computer Science, Miscellaneous, Research, Wireless Networks by Jason Ernst
Tags: Artificial Neural Networks, Encryption, Security, Wireless
Perimeter Institute Physics Festival!
September 8th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
This may be only marginally related to computer science, but if you are like me, you may also have an interest in physics (and for those who don’t I think there are some lectures on quantum computers which may be cool). The festival runs in October and there is about a week or so of events including lectures, panel discussions and even live taping of TV shows (Steve Paiken if you are familiar with his show). You can register starting today for some of the events and next week for some as well. Here is the link: http://q2cfestival.com
Posted in Miscellaneous, News by Jason Ernst
Tags: Permiter Institute, Physics, Steve Paiken, The Agenda
Second Beginning at Guelph & September Conferences in Ontario!
September 3rd, 2009 by Jason Ernst
This month I start for the second time at the University of Guelph, this time for my Ph.D. degree. I am continuing to work under the same supervisor and hopefully continue along with similar research in the area of wireless mesh networks. Our lab (PerWin) is supposed to be getting a bunch of new equipment from a company in Toronto so I will finally be able to move away from simulation and into some practical experiments.
In a slightly related note, I am attending two wireless network conferences in Ontario in the upcoming weeks. At the end of September I am volunteering at the adhocnets 2009 conference in Niagara Falls. I am quite excited about one of the keynote speakers (Prof. Ian Akyildiz) who has written some excellent survey papers in the area. The same week I am attending the IEEE TIC STH conference at Ryerson University in Toronto. I am presenting a paper on cross layer scheduling and resource allocation in wireless mesh networks.
Posted in Computer Science, News by Jason Ernst
