Dynamic technology leadership: The adaptive role of the CTO

OVERVIEW: The importance of the chief technology officer role is widely accepted, particularly in today's turbulent, global conditions. However, not enough is known about the key activities of CTOs or the factors that influence their priorities. Thirty in-depth interviews conducted with the CTOs in global firms identified key activities: aligning technology and corporate strategy and business models, determining technology entry and exit points, and preparing business cases to secure funding for technology development. The research also showed that priority areas for CTOs are related to technology transition points-major contextual and business discontinuities that impact the focus of the CTO. We conclude that the determination of priorities at these technology transition points is highly idiosyncratic and closely related to whether the CTO functions more or less strategically.

Factor analysis based VTS discriminative adaptive training

Vector Taylor Series (VTS) model based compensation is a powerful approach for noise robust speech recognition. An important extension to this approach is VTS adaptive training (VAT), which allows canonical models to be estimated on diverse noise-degraded training data. These canonical model can be estimated using EM-based approaches, allowing simple extensions to discriminative VAT (DVAT). However to ensure a diagonal corrupted speech covariance matrix the Jacobian (loading matrix) relating the noise and clean speech is diagonalised. In this work an approach for yielding optimal diagonal loading matrices based on minimising the expected KL-divergence between the diagonal loading matrix and "correct" distributions is proposed. The performance of DVAT using the standard and optimal diagonalisation was evaluated on both in-car collected data and the Aurora4 task. © 2012 IEEE.

Gaps between assistive technologies and dementia care

A growing number of people are now entering the elderly age category in Japan; this raises the likelihood of more persons with dementia, as the probability of becoming cognitively impaired increases with age. There is an increasing need for caregivers who are well trained and experienced and who can pay special attention to the needs of people with dementia. Technology can play an important role in helping such people and their caregivers. A lack of mutual understanding between caregivers and researchers regarding the appropriate uses of assistive technologies is another problem. We have described the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT), especially assistive technologies, and social issues as a first step towards developing a technology roadmap. © 2012 IEEE.

Adaptive sequential Monte Carlo approach for real-time applications

This paper presents an adaptive Sequential Monte Carlo approach for real-time applications. Sequential Monte Carlo method is employed to estimate the states of dynamic systems using weighted particles. The proposed approach reduces the run-time computation complexity by adapting the size of the particle set. Multiple processing elements on FPGAs are dynamically allocated for improved energy efficiency without violating real-time constraints. A robot localisation application is developed based on the proposed approach. Compared to a non-adaptive implementation, the dynamic energy consumption is reduced by up to 70% without affecting the quality of solutions. © 2012 IEEE.

SOI sensing technologies for harsh environment

This paper reviews and addresses certain aspects of Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) technologies for a harsh environment. The paper first describes the need for specialized sensors in applications such as (i) domestic and other small-scale boilers, (ii) CO2 Capture and Sequestration, (iii) oil & gas storage and transportation, and (iv) automotive. We describe in brief the advantages and special features of SOI technology for sensing applications requiring temperatures in excess of the typical bulk silicon junction temperatures of 150oC. Finally we present the concepts, structures and prototypes of simple and smart micro-hotplate and Infra Red (IR) based emitters for NDIR (Non Dispersive IR) gas sensors in harsh environments. © 2012 IEEE.

Heterogeneous reconfigurable system for adaptive particle filters in real-time applications

This paper presents a heterogeneous reconfigurable system for real-time applications applying particle filters. The system consists of an FPGA and a multi-threaded CPU. We propose a method to adapt the number of particles dynamically and utilise the run-time reconfigurability of the FPGA for reduced power and energy consumption. An application is developed which involves simultaneous mobile robot localisation and people tracking. It shows that the proposed adaptive particle filter can reduce up to 99% of computation time. Using run-time reconfiguration, we achieve 34% reduction in idle power and save 26-34% of system energy. Our proposed system is up to 7.39 times faster and 3.65 times more energy efficient than the Intel Xeon X5650 CPU with 12 threads, and 1.3 times faster and 2.13 times more energy efficient than an NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPU. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Comparison of two seal technologies for hydraulic microactuators

In order to improve the power density of microactuators, recent research focuses on the applicability of fluidic power at microscale. One of the reasons that hydraulic actuators are still uncommon in micro system technology is due to the difficulty of fabricating powerful microseals. This paper presents two seal technologies that are suitable for sealing small-scale hydraulic actuators. Measurements on prototype actuators show that force densities up to 0,45 N/mm2 (0,025 N/mm3) and work densities up to 0,2 mJ/mm3 can easily be achieved with the developed seal technology. These characteristics can still be improved as the maximum driving pressures of the actuators have not yet been determined. © 2005 IEEE.

Improved bounds for subband-adaptive iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithms.

This paper presents new methods for computing the step sizes of the subband-adaptive iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithms proposed by Bayram & Selesnick and Vonesch & Unser. The method yields tighter wavelet-domain bounds of the system matrix, thus leading to improved convergence speeds. It is directly applicable to non-redundant wavelet bases, and we also adapt it for cases of redundant frames. It turns out that the simplest and most intuitive setting for the step sizes that ignores subband aliasing is often satisfactory in practice. We show that our methods can be used to advantage with reweighted least squares penalty functions as well as L1 penalties. We emphasize that the algorithms presented here are suitable for performing inverse filtering on very large datasets, including 3D data, since inversions are applied only to diagonal matrices and fast transforms are used to achieve all matrix-vector products.

Adaptive regulation of vector-controlled induction motors

This paper addresses the speed and flux regulation of induction motors under the assumption that the motor parameters are poorly known. An adaptive passivity-based control is proposed that guarantees robust regulation as well as accurate estimation of the electrical parameters that govern the motor performance. This paper provides a local stability analysis of the adaptive scheme, which is illustrated by simulations and supported by a successful experimental validation on an industrial product. © 2009 IEEE.