Neither author has a financial or proprietary interest in any material or method mentioned.

No abstract

No author has a financial or proprietary interest in any material or method mentioned.

Abstract-The Hierarchical Timing Language (HTL) is a realtime coordination language for distributed control systems. HTL programs must be checked for well-formedness, race freedom, transmission safety (schedulability of inter-host communication), and time safety (schedulability of host computation). We present a modular abstract syntax and semantics for HTL, modular checks of well-formedness, race freedom, and transmission safety, and modular code distribution. Our contributions here complement previous results on HTL time safety and modular code generation. Modularity in HTL can be utilized in easy program composition as well as fast program analysis and code generation, but also in so-called runtime patching, where program components may be modified at runtime.

The design and development of the Swordfish Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) system is discussed. Swordfish is an ocean capable 4.5m long catamaran designed for network centric operations (with ocean and air going vehicles and human operators). In the basic configuration, Swordfish is both a survey vehicle and a communications node with gateways for broadband, Wi-Fi and GSM transports and underwater acoustic modems. In another configuration, Swordfish mounts a docking station for the autonomous underwater vehicle Isurus from Porto University. Swordfish has an advanced control architecture for multi-vehicle operations with mixed initiative interactions (human operators are allowed to interact with the control loops).

The implantation of the Tecnis multifocal toric IOL in patients with cataract and corneal astigmatism provided excellent distance and near visual acuities with good intermediate visual acuity. Predictability of refractive results, rotational stability, and optical performance were excellent, allowing all patients in this series to achieve spectacle independence. [J Refract Surg. 2016;32(7):444-450.].

We present a model for measuring the impact of offloading soft real-time jobs over multi-tier cloud infrastructures. The jobs originate in mobile devices and offloading strategies may choose to execute them locally, in neighbouring devices, in cloudlets or in infrastructure cloud servers. Within this specification, we put forward several such offloading strategies characterised by their differential use of the cloud tiers with the goal of optimizing execution time and/or energy consumption. We implement an instance of the model using Jay, a software framework for adaptive computation offloading in hybrid edge clouds. The framework is modular and allows the model and the offloading strategies to be seamlessly implemented while providing the tools to make informed runtime offloading decisions based on system feedback, namely through a built-in system profiler that gathers runtime information such as workload, energy consumption and available bandwidth for every participating device or server. The results show that offloading strategies sensitive to runtime conditions can effectively and dynamically adjust their offloading decisions to produce significant gains in terms of their target optimization functions, namely, execution time, energy consumption and fulfilment of job deadlines.

No abstract