Serious games that are designed for educational purposes promote acquisition of knowledge and skills that are valued in the both the virtual realm and the real world. The challenge is to design serious games that leverage meaningful play to produce positive learning outcomes in the real world. I argue that...
Embedded systems are ubiquitous. Although many aspects of embedded system design and synthesis have received significant research attention, comparatively less attention has been given to new ideas in memory hierarchy design. This dissertation presents several new operating system and architecture techniques that use elements of the virtual and physical memory...
Technology users are technology observers as well, monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges for everything from detecting situations to responding to situations to changing the tools to match a changing operating environment or the observer's changing knowledge....
The light field is a 4D function that describes the flow of light in all directions through every point in free space. Digital cameras only capture a 2D projection of the 4D light field entering the camera lens. In this dissertation I modify the light field as it enters a...
The recent years have witnessed a large number of emerging applications in location based services, thanks to the wide spread use of GPS devices, cellular phones, RFID tags and mobile sensor nodes. A fundamental technology that enables such services is the efficient management of the vast volume of spatio-temporal information...
Virtual machine based distributed computing greatly simplifies and enhances adaptive/autonomic computing by lowering the level of abstraction, benefiting both resource providers and users. We are developing Virtuoso, a middleware system for virtual machine shared-resource computing (e.g. grids) that provides numerous advantages and overcomes many obstacles a user faces in using...
Live streaming media will form a significant fraction of Internet traffic in the near future. YouTube clips, animations and other video applications already account for more than sixty percent of Internet traffic and, at its current acceptance rate, streaming media could quickly surpass television in terms of the size of...
High-performance scientific computing in a modern age uses parallel techniques at a scale of hundreds of thousands of processors. These large-scale applications have I/O system workloads that are primarily driven by small, sparse I/O operations. While parallel file systems have provided application developers with scalable peak I/O bandwidth for large,...
We can represent many real-world data sets as data streams and/or high-dimensional data. Major stock market such as New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) trades more than 8000 financial products daily, which generates massive trading time series in the form of data streams. NetFlow and DNS querying data generated by real-time...
Humans routinely answer questions, make decisions, and provide explanations in the face of incomplete knowledge and time constraints. From everyday questions like "What will it cost to take that vacation?" to policy questions like "How can a carbon taxing scheme affect climate change?" we often do not have all the...