{"title":"Embedded Systems Education: Job Market Expectations","authors":"M. Sami, M. Malek, U. Bondi, F. Regazzoni","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829961","url":null,"abstract":"In the fifteen years since the first Embedded Systems Design Master studies were proposed the embedded systems world has radically changed. The spectrum of application areas has increased beyond any expectation, and the increasing presence of embedded systems in the physical world has led to \"cyber-physical systems.\" Devices tend to become a commodity in many cases, while sensors and IPs acquire a larger share of the market. The whole industrial ecosystem is changing as well, with \"application\" companies becoming increasingly present and SMEs emerging as major players. It becomes mandatory to reconsider the competences and capacities that should be provided in a Master of Science course oriented to Embedded Systems Design, so as to meet new and diverse requests that come from job market and prospective employers. Within the frame of the Nano-Tera Swiss Federal program (www.nano-tera.ch), the educational project Future Embedded Systems Education (FESTE) aimed at identifying requests coming from the job market, so as to outline the renewed professional profile for young Embedded Systems Designers. The results indicate that programming, networking, real time and system architecture know-how combined with soft skills such as teamwork and communication are in demand and frequently come under disguised names such as automation or control engineering.","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122706275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Walid Taha, Robert Cartwright, Roland Philippsen, Yingfu Zeng
{"title":"Developing A First Course on Cyber-Physical Systems","authors":"Walid Taha, Robert Cartwright, Roland Philippsen, Yingfu Zeng","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829964","url":null,"abstract":"Effective and creative cyber-physical systems (CPS) development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in several distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper, we report on our recent experience developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course addresses the following three questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How should these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of cyber-physical systems? Our experience with the first three offerings of the course has been positive overall. We also discuss the lessons we learned from some issues that were not handled well. All material including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online.","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125603783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Model Based Design Approach To System Building Using The e-Yantra Educational Robot","authors":"K. Arya, Blossom Coelho, S. Pandya","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829963","url":null,"abstract":"The e-Yantra robot is the basis for a highly scalable embedded systems teaching program setting up 500 embedded systems labs in Indian engineering colleges. A key strategy to encourage rapid prototyping of applications has been to encourage reuse of code using a commodity robot with a standard API along with excellent documentation and training material. An important challenge has been to teach the reasoning process from a design through to an implementation deployed on an actual machine. Model based design is key to articulating such reasoning. A further challenge is to do this in an affordable manner where most available model-based IDEs are expensive proprietary systems using languages such as Esterel and SCADE. We illustrate with a \"Valet Parking\" application how our robotic eco-system facilitates the learning of important model-based design principles taking a high-level specification of a problem down to working code and even deriving test cases in the process. A novel feature of our approach is that we carry out design-time scheduling of various (concurrent) activities by analyzing dependencies between modules and obtain purely sequential C-code implemented on a microcontroller without the need for an RTOS. This case study is an exemplar of a model-based design approach for a large class of such robotic projects.","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128040837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nikita Bhardwaj, Maximilian Senftleben, K. Schneider
{"title":"Abacus: A Processor Family for Education","authors":"Nikita Bhardwaj, Maximilian Senftleben, K. Schneider","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829959","url":null,"abstract":"We present the Abacus processor family and its compiler framework for the MiniC language that we have developed for teaching processor architectures. Besides typical RISC instructions, Abacus also offers instructions for vector processing and thread synchronization, but it is still small enough to be discussed completely in a class. With reasonable effort, students can therefore modify given implementations of micro-architectures and code generators to deepen their understanding of the theoretical concepts. Moreover, using benchmark examples, they can explore the quantitative aspects of their optimizations. In contrast to commercial and other educational processors, we provide many micro-architectures that are based on a pure concept only rather than on a combination of concepts, and we provide code generators which contain the core ideas of some architectures.","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116006342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RTFM-core: Course in Compiler Construction","authors":"Marcus Lindner, Andreas Lindner, P. Lindgren","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829962","url":null,"abstract":"The course in Compiler Construction is part of the Computer Science masters program at Luleå University of Technology (LTU). Since the fall of 2014, the course is given by the Embedded Systems group. This paper outlines the course syllabus and its relation to CPS/IoT and embedded systems in general. In particular, the course introduces domain specific language design with the outset from the imperative RTFM-core language. Students are exposed to design choices for the language, spanning from programming model, compiler design issues, back-end tools, and even runtime environments. The intention is to give a holistic perspective and motivate the use of compilation techniques towards robust, efficient, and verifiable (embedded) software. Of course, developing basic skills is not overlooked and as part of the laboratory assignments, students extend the minimalistic Object Oriented language RTFM-cOOre and develop the compiler accordingly targeting the RTFM-core language as an intermediate representation. As the RTFM-core/-cOOre compilers are implemented using OCaml/Menhir, the students are also exposed to functional languages and to their advantages in the context of compiler construction. However, for their own development they may choose alternative design tools and languages. This gives us the opportunity to review and correlate achievements and efficiency to the choice of tools and languages and it is an outset for future course development.","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123708979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards curricula for Cyber-Physical Systems","authors":"M. Grimheden, Martin Törngren","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829965","url":null,"abstract":"Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems education faces several challenges as well as opportunities as every-\"thing\" becomes connected, and as technology development accelerates. Initiatives such as CDIO, as well as several other academic and industry initiatives to create new CPS programs illustrate strong interests and awareness of these challenges. We provide an overview of foreseen educational needs, existing state of the art in education and an analysis of the subject of CPS with the purpose of understanding the implications for education. The investigation points to key issues in curriculum design regarding balancing depth and breadth, theory and practices, academic and industrial needs, and core technical skills with complementary skills. Curricula in CPS could, if the right balance is achieved, educate CPS engineers of the future that are \"ready to engineer\".","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128314341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Educating Embedded Systems Hackers: A practitioner's perspective","authors":"Sagar Behere, Martin Törngren","doi":"10.1145/2829957.2829958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829958","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents some practical skills which bridge the gap between a sound theoretical education in embedded systems and the skillset acquired by experienced practitioners in the field. The presentation of each skill is accompanied by common solution patterns, state-of-practice technologies, and a set of exercises to provide practical uptake of each skill.","PeriodicalId":338659,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the WESE'14: Workshop on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems Education","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114544939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}