Top 100 Electronics,China Electric Tools

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday introduced a new lineup of Embedded R-Series central processors for high-performance applications like network attached storage (NAS), as well as kicking off a promotion that knocks 20 percent off the price of a CPU-GPU platform for visually demanding applications like digital gaming and signage.

The new Embedded R-Series chips include the quad-core, 2.3GHz RE464X (35 watts, 3.2GHz maximum boost frequency), dual-core, 2.7GHz RE272X (35W, 3.2GHz), and dual-core, 2.2GHz RE264X (17W, 2.8GHz).

The promotional program offers embedded system builders a platform which includes a new Embedded R-Series CPU and a choice of either AMD's Radeon E6460 or E6760 discrete graphics solutions, both capable of supporting up to six independent displays, the chip maker said.

"There is a need for a greater variety of processor and graphics options in several market segments ranging from storage to digital signage and gaming to meet ever growing performance requirements," Kamal Khouri, director of embedded products at AMD, said in a statement.

"The AMD Embedded R-Series CPU platform targets performance-intensive embedded applications with a new discrete graphics program to meet the diverse, high-performance requirements of the embedded engineering community. These new choices offer higher compute and graphics throughput plus compelling TCO for the embedded market."

AMD compared the performance levels of its new Embedded R-Series CPUs to equivalent parts in Intel's embedded processor lineup but offered at a significantly lower price which provides embedded system builders with "up to 2.5X greater performance per-dollar compared to Intel i3 processors."

The chip maker is currently shipping its new Embedded R-Series CPUs and the new parts are being used in products from Advantech, Advantech-Innocore, Aewin, DFI, MSC Embedded, Quixant, and other embedded system builders, AMD said.

View the original article here

Dr. Cranos Williams

Drs. Cranos Williams (PI), Terri Long (CoPI), James Tuck (CoPI), and Joel Ducoste (CoPI) have been awarded $999,754 by the National Science Foundation for research on Dynamic Regulatory Modeling of the Iron Deficiency Response in Arabidopsis thaliana.

The award will run from August 15th, 2012 to July 31st, 2017.

Research Abstract

Multicellular organisms such as plants react to abiotic stress with a multitude of physiological and molecular responses orchestrated by key regulatory proteins, or transcription factors. Experimental datasets, such as transcriptional profiles, are often used to identify critical, yet, uncharacterized transcription factors in these responses.  Limitations in these datasets caused by constraints in experimental perturbations and finite experimental resources are the reasons why traditional approaches have revealed few key regulating and controlling elements, particularly in model organisms such as Arabidopsis thaliana.  The PIs hypothesize that additional computer-based simulations from dynamic gene regulatory models can be used in combination with clustering approaches to expand the perturbation space and assess secondary and tertiary control mechanisms, leading to the identification of hidden regulatory relationships between genes and transcription factors. They propose to develop a novel modeling and parallel computing paradigm to identify previously uncharacterized regulatory components that control iron homeostasis in A. thaliana across multiple cell types.

The interdisciplinary approach proposed by these PIs presents a new paradigm that 1) unifies novel genomic experimental techniques, engineering modeling approaches, and parallel computing to clarify the role of known regulatory elements and 2) identifies new regulating components involved in iron homeostasis within and across different cell types. Their integration of systems engineering, plant biology, and computer engineering will help create new solutions to existing problems and encourages a vision for addressing challenging issues that have, to date, remained intimidating using traditional approaches. Their results will lead to methods for stretching critical resources and increasing crop yields to feed the projected 9 billion people in 2050 through development of plants that exhibit improved function in low nutrient soils, or plants that can contain elevated nutrient content.

View the original article here

 
Dr. Edgar Lobaton

Dr. Edgar Lobaton, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University, has been awarded $206,192 by the University of California - Berkeley for research on Provably Safe Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems with Humans-in-the-Loop.

The award will run from October 1st, 2012 to September 30th, 2015.

Research Abstract: The automotive sector is one of the richest targets for emerging innovations in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). Increased content electronics, non-contact sensors, controls and communication with the environment and the driver will change the way we drive and interact with our cars in the near future. However, despite the enormous number of fatalities and injuries on US and world roads, there is an enormous gap between research achievements in autonomous drive and the active safety systems currently available in production vehicles. We propose a paradigm shift which looks at whole cyber physical vehicle/environment/driver and thus address all its three main critical components: (A) the vehicle/environment interaction, (B) the driver uncertainty and (C) the provably-safe intervention under the predicted uncertainty of A and B.  We will develop a novel science for  of Cyber-Physical Systems with the goal of obtaining a provably safe human-centric autonomy where  certification is evidence-based and evolves with the system (as new driver behaviors, scenes, slipping dynamics enter in the database of the CPS we construct in real-time). Robustness is measured against bounded state-dependent uncertainty of a driver/vehicle interaction model and of the scene reconstruction.

View the original article here

 
Wente Zheng (L) & Dr. Mo-Yuen Chow (R)

Dr. Mo-Yuen Chow, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University and Wente Zheng, a Ph.D. student, have developed a software algorithm that detects and isolates cyber-attacks on networked control systems - which are used to coordinate transportation, power and other infrastructure across the United States.

Networked control systems are essentially pathways that connect and coordinate activities between computers and physical devices. For example, the systems that connect temperature sensors, heating systems and user controls in modern buildings are networked control systems.

But, on a much larger scale, these systems are also becoming increasingly important to national infrastructure, such as transportation and power. And, because they often rely on wireless or Internet connections, these systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. "Flame" and "Stuxnet" are examples of costly, high-profile attacks on networked control systems in recent years.

As networked control systems have grown increasingly large and complex, system designers have moved away from having system devices - or "agents" - coordinate their activities through a single, centralized computer hub, or brain. Instead, designers have created "distributed network control systems" (D-NCSs) that allow all of the system agents to work together, like a bunch of mini-brains, to coordinate their activities. This allows the systems to operate more efficiently. And now these distributed systems can also operate more securely.

NC State researchers have developed a software algorithm that can detect when an individual agent in a D-NCS has been compromised by a cyber-attack. The algorithm then isolates the compromised agent, protecting the rest of the system and allowing it to continue functioning normally. This gives D-NCSs resilience and security advantages over systems that rely on a central computer hub, because the centralized design means the entire system would be compromised if the central computer is hacked.

"In addition, our security algorithm can be incorporated directly into the code used to operate existing distributed control systems, with minor modifications," says Dr. Chow, co-author of a paper on the work. "It would not require a complete overhaul of existing systems."

"We have demonstrated that the system works, and are now moving forward with additional testing under various cyber-attack scenarios to optimize the algorithm's detection rate and system performance," says Wente Zeng, lead author of the paper.

The paper, "Convergence and Recovery Analysis of the Secure Distributed Control Methodology for D-NCS," will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics, May 28-31, in Taipei, Taiwan. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

"Convergence and Recovery Analysis of the Secure Distributed Control Methodology for D-NCS"

Authors: Wente Zeng and Mo-Yuen Chow, North Carolina State University

Presented: May 28-31, IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract: Distributed control algorithms (e.g., consensus algorithm) are vulnerable to the misbehaving agent compromised by the cyber-attacks in Distributed Networked Control Systems (D-NCS). In this paper we continue our work on the proposed secure distributed control methodology that is capable of performing a secure consensus computation in D-NCS in the presence of misbehaving agents. The methodology is introduced first and proved to be effective through the convergence analysis. We then extend our secure distributed control methodology to the leaderless consensus network by introducing and adding two recovery schemes into the current secure distributed control framework to guarantee the accurate convergence in the presence of misbehaving agents. All phases in our method are distributed in the sense that at each step of the detection, mitigation, identification, update and recovery, every agent only uses local and one-hop neighbors' information.  The simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Credit: Matt Shipman | NCSU News Services

View the original article here