Virtual Radio Engine

Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware platforms use parallel architectures. Current concepts of developing applications (such as WLAN) for these platforms are complex, because developers describe an application with hardware-specifics that are relevant to parallelism such as mapping and scheduling. To reduce this complexity, we have developed a new programming approach for SDR applications, called Virtual Radio Engine (VRE). VRE defines a language for describing applications, and a tool chain that consists of a compiler kernel and other tools (such as a code generator) to generate executables. The thesis presents this concept, as well as describes the language and the compiler kernel that have been developed by the author. The language is hardware-independent, i.e., developers describe tasks and dependencies between them. The compiler kernel performs automatic parallelization, i.e., it is capable of transforming a hardware-independent program into a hardware-specific program by solving hardware-specifics, in particular mapping, scheduling and synchronizations. Thus, VRE simplifies programming tasks as developers do not solve hardware-specifics manually.

Gone with the internet - How the old education was lost

Despite its young history, Computer Science Education has seen a number of "revolutions". Being a veteran in the field, the author reflects on the many changes he has seen in computing and its teaching. The intent of this personal collection is to point out that most revolutions came unforeseen and that many of the new learning initiatives, despite high financial input, ultimately failed. The author then considers the current revolution (MOOC, inverted lectures, peer instruction, game design) and, based on the lessons learned earlier, argues why video recording is so successful. Given the fact that this is the decade we lost print (papers, printed books, book shops, libraries), the author then conjectures that the impact of the Internet will make this revolution different from previous ones in that most of the changes are irreversible. As a consequence he warns against storming ahead blindly and suggests to conserve - while it is still possible - valuable components of what might soon be called the antebellum age of education.