WPCCS 2018 Guest Speakers
The full schedule is available here.
Michael Gale - OC0.02 - 9:15
Design patterns in 2018
Most of us are familiar with design patterns in object-oriented programming languages, which attempt to capture reusable ideas with respect to the design of software. However, these design patterns are often viewed as overly convoluted and their implementations are rarely reusable. In this talk, we will take a look at design patterns in functional programming languages. Unlike their object-oriented relatives, functional design patterns are grounded in abstract mathematics and their implementations are highly reusable. To illustrate this, we will see how many useful functions can be defined in terms of a single, overloaded function. This allows us to write highly reusable code which works on almost arbitrary data structures.
Suhaib Fahmy - OC0.02 - 10:55
FPGAs: From Glue Logic to High Performance Compute Acceleration
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) emerged over three decades ago, offering a way to build small compute functions to bind discrete components in electronic systems. Since then, their capabilities have increased tremendously, resulting in their use today in wide-ranging application domains, from high frequency trading, through bioinformatics, networking, high energy physics, to machine learning. They offer one way to overcome the stalled performance scaling of traditional Von Neumann processor architecture, while also addressing the energy challenges posed by massive scale computation. This talk will discuss the evolution of FPGAs, how they differ from other architectures, some of the exciting ways they are being used today, and exciting research on the horizon.
Jonathan Hatchett - OC0.02 - 13:30
WebEXR: An Online High Dynamic Range Image Viewer
We present a tool for sharing full range high dynamic range (HDR) images online. Using Emscripten together with existing C++ decoding libraries, HDR image content is made available to JavaScript in a web browser environment. Using WebGL, the results are presented to the user with real-time, interactive tone-mapping. We compare the decoding performance of Emscripten and native code, showing less than an order of magnitude difference between the two.
Web content has traditionally been limited to 8-bit, low dynamic range (LDR) images. With HDR imaging, all of the light in the scene can be captured, processed and displayed. The existing pipeline for sharing HDR images online is to convert the data to an 8-bit representation, known as a tone-mapping, before uploading the resulting image to the internet. The quantisation required is one-way and the inverse cannot be calculated exactly. Therefore, the final experience of the image is reduced as information is lost.
By providing full HDR content to the browser, tone-mapping is left up to the user, who can choose to view the information they are most interested. This view can be shared with other users simply with a reference to the image and the metadata.
Key Dates
Submissions Open: 18th April 2018
Submissions Close: 23rd May 2018
Author Notification and Schedule Release: 4th June 2018
Resubmission Closes: 10th June 2018
Schedule Confirmation: 15th June 2018
Event: 29th June 2018