Instructions for contribution to the 2006 CHESS Annual Report

The CHESS Annual Report is due to NSF by 31 May 2006. In order to meet this deadline, we are asking all involved faculty and students to submit information to Tracey Richards (tracey@ERSO) by 15 May, as described below. Information is divided into that for students, faculty, and general publications.

Summary:

Make a list of your name, citizenship status, publications, collaborators, relevant software, and (if you are faculty) important research results, according to the below specifications.
If you are a student or faculty at Berkeley, please enter all relevant publications to the CHESS publications database and send only the titles.
Email this to Tracey Richards (if you are student, CC your advisor), as a student, or as faculty.
Do it all before 15 May 2006, 24:00 hours PDT

Note the deadline is 15 May 2006 at 24:00 hours PDT. We will begin assimilating the data on 16 May at 8:00 PDT. If you have not responded by that time, we will contact you and your faculty advisor. This most important part of the annual report to gather is information on publications.

Students: Go to overview of requirements here
Or go directly to the email link here:
Faculty: Go to overview of requirements here
Or go directly to the email link here:

Publications which lack page numbers, volume/number, publication date, or abstract will not be accepted. If your publication does not yet have any of this information, please specify that it is (in publication) or (submitted), as is appropriate. Otherwise, we will return your email and request you fill in that information.

FAQ:

If I have submitted my pubs to the CHESS website, am I done?
No, you must also submit information such as your citizenship, correct spelling of your name, external and internal collaborators, and (if you are faculty) a list of the students you supported.
Why must I resubmit publication information in the email if it is already in the database?
There are two reasons: (a) because we need to know whether the publication acknowledged the ITR for funding or not, and (b) because while the database will give us all items published during a range, we will also report papers which will be submitted before the end of May that may be published after that time.
I tried to submit a publication, but the "Add Publication" link is inactive, or I cannot see it. I have also seen the error code that I don't have 'write permission'. What's going on?
First, make sure you are logged in. If you are still unable to add a publication, you may not be a member of the 'chess' workgroup. Request membership in that group by visiting the "options" tab, at the right of the Chess Webpage menu bar, or by visiting this link.

Students

If you are a student funded through CHESS, you should contribute to the annual report as requested below:

Your name, as you prefer to spell it, university, and your department/area (e.g., EECS, ME)
Example: Aaron D. Ames, UC Berkeley, EECS
A list of your collaborators and their institution. A collaborator is someone with whom you have authored a paper, or contributed significantly to research software.
Example: Ian M. Mitchell, University of British Columbia
A list of your publication titles which you have entered into the CHESS Publications Database, as shown below.
- Any publication which was or will be published, accepted, or submitted (as appropriate), between 1 June 2005 and 31 May 2006.
- Please separate publication titles into two groups: those which acknowledged ITR or CHESS funding, and those which did not. You should note that if you are a student being funded by the CHESS Center then all of your publications should acknowledge CHESS as one of your funding sources. Exceptions to this statement are rare. For future reference, you can find the recommended CHESS acknowledgement listing for Berkeley "Chesslocal" students and faculty here.
A list of software releases, including their descriptions, and websites, which we can list. Please include version information, as well as the contributing authors.
You can use this student-submission email shell to submit your information. Please complete Tracey's email address if necessary, and make sure you CC your faculty advisor.

Faculty

If you are funding students through CHESS, you should contribute to the annual report as requested below:

Your name, as you prefer to spell it, and your department (e.g., EECS, ECE, ME) and University
Example: S. Shankar Sastry, UC Berkeley, EECS
A list of the students whom you have supported on the CHESS project for any portion of this year
A list of your collaborators and their institution. A collaborator is someone with whom you have authored a paper, or contributed significantly to research software, in the context of CHESS.
Example: Ian M. Mitchell, University of British Columbia
A list of important CHESS-related research results which you have accomplished this year, and a brief description of them. In this description, you may refer to publications which you list. The research results portion of the annual report is always the most time-consuming to produce, so any help you can give will ease CHESS staff, and ensure that the ITR receives credit--important for future center funding from NSF.
A list of software releases, descriptions, and websites, which we can list. Please include version information, as well as the contributing authors.
A list of your publication titles which you have entered into the CHESS Publications Database, as shown below.
- Any publication which was or will be published, accepted, or submitted (as appropriate), between 1 June 2005 and 31 May 2006.
- Please separate publication titles into two groups: those which acknowledged ITR or CHESS funding, and those which did not. For future reference, you can find the recommended CHESS acknowledgement listing for Berkeley "Chesslocal" students and faculty here.
You can use this faculty-submission email shell to submit your information. Please complete Tracey's email address if necessary.

Examples of publications in appropriate format

Please choose the appropriate option below, depending on whether you are chesslocal or located at Vanderbilt or Memphis.

Chesslocal Students and Faculty local to Berkeley

There is a new portion of the CHESS website which is dedicated to housing publications of CHESS researchers. You can find it here:

http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/

If you upload your publications to the website correctly, we can retrieve the publication information from the website instead of your email.

Check to ensure that the publication has not already been uploaded before creating a new publication by using the search page.
Use the chess group, and any other groups you deem appropriate, when uploading
Please use full names (and not initials) when naming authors, unless the publication lists authors with initials.
Use IEEE Explore or ACM Digital Library (or another publication archive database) if you do not immediately recall the spelling of authors names, page numbers, or other information.
Please fill in all appropriate fields, and use (submitted) or (in publication) if appropriate, to describe page numbers. You can update the page numbers in the database later.
There should be an accompanying abstract to each publication listing. In the case of lengthy abstracts, there is no need to abbreviate or modify, though you may want to check to ensure that all characters come across when pasting.
Upload documents (after reading information about copyrights) as appropriate.
Send the URL of the publication listing on the CHESS website instead of the textual description.

Non-Chesslocal Researchers from Vanderbilt and Memphis

Journal:

Jonathan Sprinkle, Aaron D. Ames, J. Mikael Eklund, Ian Mitchell, S. Shankar Sastry. "Online Safety Calculations for Glideslope Recapture," Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, 1(2):157-175, September 2005.

Abstract:
As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increase in popularity and usage, an appropriate increase in confidence in their behavior is expected. This research addresses a particular portion of the flight of an aircraft (whether autonomous, unmanned, or manned): specifically, the recapture of the glide slope after a wave-off maneuver during landing. While this situation is rare in commercial aircraft, its applicability toward unmanned aircraft has been limited due to the complexity of the calculations of safety of the maneuvers. In this paper, we present several control laws for this glide-slope recapture, and inferences into their convergence to the glide slope, as well as reachability calculations which show their guaranteed safety. We also present a methodology which theoretically allows us to apply these offline-computed safety data to all kinds of unmanned fixed-wing aerial vehicles while online, permitting the use of the controllers to reduce wait times during landing. Finally, we detail the live aircraft application demonstration which was done to show feasibility of the controller, and give the results of offline simulations which show the correctness of online decisions at that demonstration.

Conference:

Aaron D. Ames, Haiyang Zheng, Robert Gregg and Shankar Sastry. "Is there Life after Zeno? Taking Executions past the Breaking (Zeno) Point," in 2006 American Control Conference (ACC), (in publication), Minneapolis, MN, June 2006.

Abstract:
In this paper we propose a technique to extend the simulation of a Zeno hybrid system beyond its Zeno time point. A Zeno hybrid system model is a hybrid system with an execution that takes an infinite number of discrete transitions during a finite time interval. We argue that the presence of Zeno behavior indicates that the hybrid system model is incomplete by considering some classical Zeno models that incompletely describe the dynamics of the system being modeled. This motivates the systematic development of a method for completing hybrid system models through the introduction of new post-Zeno states, where the completed hybrid system transitions to these post-Zeno states at the Zeno time point. In practice, simulating a Zeno hybrid system is challenging in that simulation effectively halts near the Zeno time point. Moreover, due to unavoidable numerical errors, it is not practical to exactly simulate a Zeno hybrid system. Therefore, we propose a method for constructing approximations of Zeno models by leveraging the completed hybrid system model. Using these approximation, we can simulate a Zeno hybrid system model beyond its Zeno point and reveal the complete dynamics of the system being modeled.

Book:

Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems. Edward A. Lee and Pravin Varaiya, Addison Wesley, 2003.

Abstract:
This book provides an accessible introduction to signals and systems for electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science students, and is based on several years of successful classroom use at the University of California, Berkeley. The material starts with an early introduction to applications, well before students have built up enough theory to fully analyze the applications. This motivates students to learn the theory and allows students to master signals and systems at the sophomore level. The material motivates signals and systems through sound and images, as opposed to circuits, and as such calculus is the only prerequisite.

Technical Report:

Xiaojun Liu, "Semantic Foundation of the Tagged Signal Model," Ph.D. Thesis, Technical Report No. EECS-2005-31, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, December 20, 2005.

Abstract:
The tagged signal model provides a denotational framework to study properties of various models of computation. It is a generalization of the Signals and Systems approach to system modeling and specification. Having different models of computation or aspects of them specified in the tagged signal model framework provides the following opportunities. First, one can compare certain properties of the models of computation, such as their notion of synchrony. Such comparisons highlight both the differences and the commonalities among the models of computation. Second, one can define formal relations among signals and process behaviors from different models of computation. These relations have important applications in the specification and design of heterogeneous embedded systems. Third, it facilitates the cross-fertilization of results and proof techniques among models of computation. This opportunity is exploited extensively in this dissertation.
The main goal of this dissertation is to establish a semantic foundation for the tagged signal model. Both order-theoretic and metric-theoretic concepts and approaches are used. The fundamental concepts of the tagged signal model--signals, processes, and networks of processes--are formally defined. From few assumptions on the tag sets of signals, it is shown that the set of all signals with the same partially ordered tag set and the same value set is a complete partial order. This leads to a direct generalization of Kahn process networks to tagged process networks.

Building on this result, the order-theoretic approach is further applied to study timed process networks, in which all signals share the same totally ordered tag set. The order structure of timed signals provides new characterizations of the common notion of causality and the discreteness of timed signals. Combining the causality and the discreteness conditions is proved to guarantee the non-Zenoness of timed process networks.

The metric structure of tagged signals is studied from the very specific--the Cantor metric and its properties. A generalized ultrametric on tagged signals is proposed, which provides a framework for defining more specialized metrics, such as the extension of the Cantor metric to super-dense time.

The tagged signal model provides not only a framework for studying the denotational semantics of models of computation, but also useful constructs for studying implementations or simulations of tagged processes. This is demonstrated by deriving certain properties of two discrete event simulation strategies from the behavioral specifications of discrete event processes. A formulation of tagged processes as labeled transition systems provides yet another framework for comparing different implementation or simulation strategies for tagged processes. This formulation lays the foundation to future research in polymorphic implementations of tagged processes.

Proceedings:

Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Jonathan Sprinkle, Matti Rossi, 5th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM'05), Jyvavaskyla, Finland, University of Jyvavaskyla, Oct., 2005.

Abstract:
Compilation of papers from the 5th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling, including a forward from the authors.

For questions regarding this page please contact Dr. Jonathan Sprinkle.
This page last updated May 24, 2006 10:50 AM .