Marco Chirico

A new and open model to share laboratories on the Internet

A new model for sharing real laboratories on the Internet and creating a virtual on-line laboratory has been developed and validated in the field of electronic measurements. Testing theories through practice is an important approach to scientific teaching, and appropriate solutions have not yet been found to support this activity in Web-based education. The on-line laboratory addresses this issue. It allows the execution via Web of real experiments and manages concurrency among users who remotely drive instruments and carry out experiments. The experimental setup can be distributed in different real laboratories, spread on a wide-area network, and controlled by local computers. Users can practice through the network and transparently to the actual locations of the devices under test in a multiuser concurrent way. The proposed paradigm increases the possibility of practice in both academic and industrial education and enriches the current experience in e-learning.

XML technologies to design didactical distributed measurement laboratories

Laboratory activity is an open challenge for on-line teaching applied to scientific domains. The remote control of instrumentation and the execution of real experiments via Internet are topics of interest for many researchers. This paper introduces the model of a virtual laboratory that allows practicing via Internet in real laboratories spread on a wide area network. It is based on a main virtual laboratory server (VLS), one or more real laboratory servers (RLS) and client stations. Real laboratory servers control instrumentation and drive experiments. The network links all the distributed software components of the environment. The paper focuses on the use of XML (Extensible Markup Language) and its related technologies to support the development of such environment. XML plays a central role in the definition of the environment (instruments, experiments and users activities) and in the maintenance process. These technologies are very promising to address scalability and interoperability among distributed software applications and to facilitate information reuse ensuring data coherency, completeness and reliability. The proposed data organization results effective to develop, maintain and scale up the environment and facilitates the cooperation and the contribution of many partners to the virtual laboratory project.

XML data representation for testing automation

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) technologies seem to offer solutions for a wide range of automated testing issues. In fact, these technologies are very promising to address scalability and interoperability among distributed software applications and to facilitate reuse ensuring data coherency, completeness and reliability. In this paper we discuss the use of XML for representing the whole set of information regarding configuration and classification data involved with a software environment for test automation. Thus we introduce a case study where the effectiveness of this approach was used to face the automated testing of telecommunication device.

A Generalisable Experience of Distance Education in Electronics

This paper presents the proposal of setting up an environment for a standardized collection of didactic multimedia material that will offer new opportunities for sharing, reusing and distributing courses on the Internet. The proposed approach is based on the EU ARIADNE Project methodology and tools. Starting from an analysis of didactic experiences in analog and digital electronics, we suggest an extension of the approach to the Faculty of Engineering to improve the definition of new courses, the continuous upgrade of documents and the exchange of expertise.

High Performance Neurocomputing: Industrial and Medical Applications of the RAIN System

We describe here the RAIN project, aimed at demonstrating the use of High Performance Computing and Networking technologies in neural network applications for industry and medicine. The target architecture of the demonstrators is a workstation cluster: a choice suggested by the cost-effectiveness of this architecture. In order to manage both the cluster and the applications running on it, we built a Java-based interface that can be executed by any Java-enhanced browser.

Improving automation and reuse in TLC testing through COTS-based architecture

Technologies involved into the context of telecommunication systems are rapidly evolving. This means that both construction and testing specifications are constantly being modified; and it also means that products can change rapidly and affect the test requirements. Moreover, the devices, by themselves, are very complicated tangles of hardware and software issues; thus, the test automation is a great challenge. We present herein an effective proposal for leverage of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) for building a system modifying the actual test process in testing of telecommunication (TLC) products development phase. Starting from the analysis of the state-of-the-art in testing, we propose an environment addressed to assist the test planning, description, execution, and results analysis. In this paper, we present ideas and preliminary results of a project carried on by our university in co-operation with the system proving division of a leader company in the field of TLC.

RAIN: Redundant Array of Inexpensive workstations for Neurocomputing

We describe here the project RAIN, started at the beginning of 1997 and aimed to demonstrate the use of High Performance Computing and Networking technologies in neural network applications for industry and medicine. The target architecture of the demonstrators will be a cluster of workstations: this choice will allow a low-cost implementation and, at the same time, will provide some insight on the use of this relatively new (at least outside the academic world) parallel architecture. Several communication networks will be tested ranging from 10 Mb/s Ethernet to 155 Mb/s ATM.