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.

Many students I have encountered feel that this low level knowledge is not useful and that the particular assembly language is obsolete. They see the course as too difficult and a waste of time. I feel I can weigh-in on this debate is a slightly new light from many of the parties interested. I was recently a student in a similar course myself so I am not so far removed as some of the professors. On the other hand, I have had the experience of being involved in the instruction process of the course, I have completed an undergraduate degree and spent some time working so I am aware of the larger picture as well. Perhaps the problem of the course being difficult for students speaks to the state of the primary and secondary education system in Ontario / Canada, but that’s a whole different story.

In my opinion, this course is an absolute necessity for a degree in computer science, or even computer engineering. A big part of computer science to me is about being able to determine why and how a particular solution is faster or slower than another one and how we can improve existing solutions. Understanding the core principles taught in this type of course significantly help in understanding operating system concepts, distributed systems, compilers and many other higher-level topics in computer science. It also allows the student to see some of the limitations in current computer architectures and even how the existing / past architectures work. From a software engineering point of view, the difficulty in getting error feedback and troubleshooting is perfect for learning why it is a good idea to carefully plan and conceptualize your programs before writing. The more complicated topics in these type of courses require good conceptual knowledge of addressing, stacks, interrupts etc. Students can learn the benefit of visualizing the concepts with diagrams, memory maps and flow-charts. The same people who fail to understand memory concepts in this type of class likely have problems with malloc/free and recursion in c classes. Without knowing how the underlying concepts work, how can you be convinced that a particular high level implementation is faster than another one. You would be taking for granted what is happening at a lower level and making serious assumptions about how the system is working.

To me learning only high level languages without any assembly would be like skipping Newton’s physics models and going straight to quantum mechanics. You can probably describe many phenomenon much easier and better than with Newtons models, but without learning about Newton first you would not understand how quantum physics really works. You would not be convinced that certain properties are true and you would loose some of the ability to question what is really happening in some ways. It would be more difficult to extend ideas and even challenge existing paradigms. It really removes much of scientific component of program.

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!

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.

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

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.

Well after a long break from writing in my blog I am finally back! (Thanks Eddie for the encouragement to post again! haha) If you have been paying attention to my projects page you will have seen a blackberry GPS tracking tool (http://www.jasonernst.com/projects-index/blackberry-gps-tracking-tool/) that I created. This summer I got a chance to test it out across the country as I went on a 42-day cross Canada road trip. I used the tracking tool to record my locations along my trip. I was surprised to find that Telus did not charge me roaming charges for using data all over the place which was great! Anyway after my long rest, I am back and will be hopefully posting some more technical computer related topics again soon. I arrived home to find myself working on a website contract for my consulting company (http://www.ernstconsulting.ca), a book chapter with some colleagues and some other small websites for some friends. So as soon as I finish all of that expect more on my blog (oh and classes start in Sept. for my PhD! so I will likely post content related to those)

Today I set out to try to find a replacement for my LG8100 phone which has had a very long and horrible life (going through the washer and dryer several times and still working). I am interested in getting some type of blackberry an iPhone, or would even consider one of the newly popular mobile usb modem sticks. The reason for this is because I want to be able to either tether to my laptop, or use the stick to access the Internet while I travel. For instance I am planning a month long cross-Canada trip this summer. All of the sticks seem to only work on 3g networks. They don’t have information on whether they can fall back onto legacy technology at all. Well this is useless unless I can somehow stick to major metro areas. Not very useful for a “mobile” Internet technology.

Next is the price for these things. While they seem to be too expensive (monthly) to me, I am willing to pay it since I understand the costs of setting up a network in a country as spread as Canada. However if I try to tether a Blackberry or iPhone to my computer, all of the major carriers in Canada seem to add on extra costs which make it impractical. The other reason why I do like some of the blackberry models is for international use. For instance when I was in UK this past month, I couldn’t use my LG8100 phone at all. Some of the newer Blackberries supported by Rogers and Telus that I have looked at support many technologies and seem like they make work.

Anyways, this post has mostly been a rant, so feel free to leave your experiences or some suggestions on what I might do to try to get some solution to my needs. I have tried asking the sales staff at some of the places to help me out and they have been useless so far. But thats another story.

Update: I have decided on a Blackberry Storm 9530 since it supports international roaming and has many of the features I would like in a phone. It looks like I will just settle on buying a separate mobile stick for use with my laptop. I don’t want to have to worry about all of the hassle of getting the extra software & the questionable legality that is involved with trying to get data through my phone. So far I am quite happy with the phone, it is quite a step from my LG8100.

This past week I travelled to the UK to present at my first International Conference – Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2009) in Bradford, UK. My presentation was on “Fair Scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks with Multiple Gateways”. The paper for the conference was published in the main AINA conference and I presented on the first day, in the first session. It was nice to have it over with right away so that I could relax and focus on meeting as many people as possible at the conference. There were people from 40 different countries there and I feel like I met someone from almost every one of them at some point. There were over 300 people at AINA this year, which apparently is down from the last couple of years (where they had 4-500) but it was still a great conference for me. I will post my slides from my presentation in this post in case anyone is interested, along with a link to the paper once it is available. I submitted another paper last night for a conference in Toronto and am working on two more papers, so hopefully I’ll be travelling soon. I am trying to aim for ICC in South Africa next year.

Last Friday I successfully defended my thesis at Guelph. The room was full with lots of friends, students and faculty and everything went fairly smoothly. It definitely feels great to be done after almost two years building up to this. Today I finished the final revisions and submitted all of the copies with an insane amount of paperwork to Grad Program Services. Two to three weeks from now I should get my final bound copy of my thesis and it should soon be available online and in libraries . For anyone interested in reading it, email me and I can send you a pdf copy.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Preparing for the Defense before Everyone Arrives

Some Members of Pervasive Computing and Wireless Network (PerWin) Research Group, University of Guelph

Answering Questions from the Committee at Guelph

After some relaxing, a conference in UK and some business related projects I will finally have some time (hopefully) to update the site with all the projects, articles and source I have been slowly working on the past few months in between working like crazy on my M.Sc. This fall I start my Ph.D. which will likely at least start from the work I just worked on.

Just a quick post to let any readers know why there has been a lack of posts on the blog lately. I have been working like crazy on my thesis with the hope of completing it in the next month or so. I have also been preparing for the AINA 2009 conference I will be presenting at Bradford University in England. Also I have been working on a paper for a conference in Toronto (TIC-STH 2009 I think) with a deadline of May 1st May 31st (extended). So theres been alot going on and not much time.

As soon as I get the thesis completed though I hope to post alot more new content on the blog (as well as a potential redesign since this one seems a little cluttered and busy to me). Check back soon for alot more in-depth info on using ns3 since that is what I have been using for my thesis experiments lately. Update: I am set to defend on May 18th at Guelph. Let me know if you are interested in attending, I will provide more details via email.

In other news, the University of Guelph has officially accepted me to their Ph.D program to start in the Fall of this year (still under Dr. Denko) so I am pretty excited about having the opportunity to continue my research in Wireless Networks. I am still waiting on responses from a couple of other schools (Waterloo & Calgary) so if I end up getting accepted to either of those I will have quite a decision to make. Update: I have accepted a position at the University of Guelph and will be starting there in the fall of 2009.