Scientific publications

The high-tech industry produces complex devices in which software plays an important role. Since these devices have been developed for many decades, an increasing part of the software can be classified as legacy which is difficult to maintain and to extend. To improve the maintainability of legacy components, domain specific languages (DSLs) provide promising perspectives.

Multi-processor systems-on-chips are widely adopted in implementing modern streaming applications to satisfy the ever increasing computation requirements. To take advantage of this kind of platform, it is necessary to map tasks of the application properly to different processors, so as to fully exploit the inherent task-level parallelism and satisfy the stringent timing requirements.

Wireless in-vehicle networks are considered as a flexible and cost-efficient solution for the new generation of cars. One of the candidate wireless technologies for these wireless sensor networks is the IEEE 802.15.4 standard which operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. This is while the number of wireless devices that operate in this band is ever increasing.

The need for authentic and effective portrayal of the spatiotemporally changing quality of wireless links has gained wide attention especially over the last decade. Software-based link quality estimators (LQE) classify links with help of packet reception ratio (PRR), required number of packet transmissions (RNP) and scoring/grading schemes that again utilize PRR, RNP or retransmission based heuristics.

Self re-entrant flowshops consist of machines which process jobs several times. They are found in applications like TFT-LCD assembly, LED manufacturing and industrial printing. The structure of a self re-entrant flowshop influences its performance. To get better performance while reducing costs a fast performance estimation method can be used to explore the trade-offs between the structure and the performance during the design process.

Today’s embedded and cyber-physical systems are getting more connected and complex. One main challenge during development is the often loose coupling between engineering tools, which could lead to inconsistencies and errors due to the manual transfer and duplication of data. Open formats and specifications raise expectations for seamlessly integrated tool chains for systems engineering combining best-of-breed technologies and tools of different tool vendors.

Accurate link quality estimation is an important building block in quality aware routing. In an inherently lossy, unreliable and dynamic medium such as wireless, the task of accurate estimation becomes very challenging. Over the years ETX has been widely used as a reliable link quality estimation metric.

The problem of online face tracking from unconstrained videos is still unresolved. Challenges range from coping with severe online appearance variations to coping with occlusion. We propose RFTD (Robust Face Tracking-by-Detection), a system which combines tracking and detection into a single framework to robustly track a face from unconstrained videos.

Blended education, the combination of traditional face-To-face education with online possibilities, is seen as the way for the future in education. Challenge for course providers is to learn how to offer blended education and to make the transition toward blended education. In this paper, we evaluate a first version of a blended course.

Internet of Things (IoT) is triggering changes in lighting industry from the traditional closed and propriety systems to flexible, interoperable and service oriented systems. To address the challenges of this transition and catering the specific requirements of lighting networks, an Open Architecture for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems has been proposed.