Glenn Rowan Wightwick

The computation of previously inaccessible digits of π² and Catalan's constant

Paper 20: David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein, Andrew Mattingly and Glenn Wightwick, “The computation of previously inaccessible digits of π 2 and Catalan’s constant,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 60 (2013), p. 844–854. Reprinted by permission of the American Mathematical Society.

The application of publish/subscribe messaging to environmental, monitoring, and control systems

A significant opportunity exists to apply information technology to better understand and more efficiently manage large complex manmade and natural systems. These systems often involve large-scale environmental, monitoring, and control systems, operating in harsh conditions with unreliable and low-bandwidth connections between a variety of heterogeneous devices. While there are many examples of these systems deployed, increasingly, there is a requirement to tightly integrate and couple these systems with more traditional core business applications and underlying infrastructure. This requirement is motivated by the desire for organizations to respond more quickly to new opportunities or threats, to gain deeper insight into the behavior of these systems, and to leverage existing investments in common tools, software stacks, programming models, and infrastructure. Deployment of such systems requires a pervasive messaging infrastructure to enable intercommunication of applications and devices. The publish/subscribe messaging paradigm has a number of characteristics that make it very attractive in this environment. These include scalability, efficiency, decoupling between publishing and subscribing entities, and the ability to integrate a wide variety of devices and systems. In this paper, we explore the application of the publish/subscribe messaging paradigm and a programming model to environmental, monitoring, and control systems, drawing on experience of projects from a variety of industries.

Classical Conditioning in Social Robots

Classical conditioning is important in humans to learn and predict events in terms of associations between stimuli and to produce responses based on these associations. Social robots that have a classical conditioning skill like humans will have an advantage to interact with people more naturally, socially and effectively. In this paper, we present a novel classical conditioning mechanism and describe its implementation in ASMO cognitive architecture. The capability of this mechanism is demonstrated in the Smokey robot companion experiment. Results show that Smokey can associate stimuli and predict events in its surroundings. ASMO’s classical conditioning mechanism can be used in social robots to adapt to the environment and to improve the robots’ performances.

A numeric weather prediction model for the IBM SP2 parallel computer

A limited-area numeric weather prediction model specifically targeted for parallel computers has been successfully implemented an an IBM SP2 distributed-memory parallel computer. The model employs an explicit finite-difference scheme and was parallelised using a simple domain decomposition technique. On a twelve processor SP2, a 24 hour forecast using archived operational data and including a sophisticated representation of physical processes was run at a range of resolutions between 150 km and 19 km and near-linear speedups were achieved. Major weather centres have indicated a requirement for regional prediction models to be run at resolutions of approximately 5 km by the end of the decade. Based on this work, it appears that this target can be achieved through the use of scalable parallel computers.<<ETX>>

Engineering resilient information systems for emergency management

Resilience is often a qualitative property that is considered fundamental for communities affected by disasters. The concept, along with its variations, has been explored in several domains, such as warfare, business continuity, ecology, computer security, and infrastructure management. The lessons learned constitute a valuable starting point for building resilient socio-technical systems. In previous work, we have described resilience principles at the systems level by reviewing related studies in several research areas. This paper organizes the principles into a conceptual framework for resilient design, which includes a set of nonfunctional requirements for resilience and an assessment methodology for evaluating architectural work from a resilience standpoint. After having presented this conceptual framework, we discuss its application in our collaboration with the Victorian Fire Services Commissioner. This collaboration has led to the specification of a high-level reference architecture for the information interoperability platform that will support emergency services in Victoria.