Facilitating Mechanical Design with Augmented Reality

By enhancing a real scene with computer generated objects, Augmented Reality (AR), has proven itself as a valuable Human-Computer Interface (HCI) in numerous application areas such as medical, military, entertainment and manufacturing. It enables higher performance of on-site tasks with seamless presentation of up-to-date, task-related information to the users during the operation. AR has potentials in design because the current interface provided by Computer-aided Design (CAD) packages is less intuitive and reports show that the presence of physical objects help design thinking and communication. This research explores the use of AR to improve the efficiency of a design process, specifically in mechanical design.

Pi: A Parallel Architecture Interface for Multi-Model Execution

This thesis defines Pi, a parallel architecture interface that separates model and machine issues, allowing them to be addressed independently. This provides greater flexibility for both the model and machine builder. Pi addresses a set of common parallel model requirements including low latency communication, fast task switching, low cost synchronization, efficient storage management, the ability to exploit locality, and efficient support for sequential code. Since Pi provides generic parallel operations, it can efficiently support many parallel programming models including hybrids of existing models. Pi also forms a basis of comparison for architectural components.

A Virtual Machine for a Type-omega Denotational Proof Language

In this thesis, I designed and implemented a virtual machine (VM) for a monomorphic variant of Athena, a type-omega denotational proof language (DPL). This machine attempts to maintain the minimum state required to evaluate Athena phrases. This thesis also includes the design and implementation of a compiler for monomorphic Athena that compiles to the VM. Finally, it includes details on my implementation of a read-eval-print loop that glues together the VM core and the compiler to provide a full, user-accessible interface to monomorphic Athena. The Athena VM provides the same basis for DPLs that the SECD machine does for pure, functional programming and the Warren Abstract Machine does for Prolog.