[UCI-Calit2] CS Seminar Series - Friday, Oct. 26, 2012

Anna Lynn Spitzer aspitzer at calit2.uci.edu
Thu Oct 25 13:57:51 PDT 2012


Computer Science SEMINAR SERIES 

Title: 		Building Fake Body Parts: Real-Time Digital Mockups of
Physiological Systems

Speaker: 	Frank Vahid, professor of computer science and
engineering, UC Riverside  

Time: 		11 a.m.-noon

Date:		Friday, Oct. 26, 2012

Location: 	Donald Bren Hall, room 6011


Abstract: Designing computer-based medical devices like pacemakers or
ventilators is hard, in part because testing can't be done on real
humans. PC-based simulations are slow and inaccurate. Using physical
mockups, like connecting a ventilator device to a balloon acting as a
lung, can't support sufficiently diverse scenarios, like fluid in the
lungs. This talk describes joint UCR/UCI work on developing "digital
mockups" -- models of physiological systems that execute in real-time,
supporting thorough testing of device software. We show that FPGAs
(field-programmable gate arrays) -- widely-available programmable chips
having a unique execution approach that we'll describe -- are an
excellent match for executing physiological models, yielding
order-of-magnitude speedups over PCs, GPUs, and other computing
approaches. The talk describes the synthesis approach to automatically
converting models, consisting of thousands of differential equations,
into networks of processing elements on FPGAs. Real-time execution of
physiological models can also be useful in building complete human
simulators, used today medical and nursing schools. More broadly,
real-time execution of physical systems (chemical, biological,
mechanical, physiological, etc.) can be useful in the design of a wide
variety of what today are called cyber-physical systems -- systems where
computers interact closely with the physical world -- including
automobiles, aircraft, medical equipment, military equipment,
manufacturing systems, and much more.

Bio: 	Frank Vahid is a professor of computer science and engineering
at the University of California, Riverside (B.S. 1988 Univ. of Illinois
in 1988, M.S./Ph.D. 1990/1994 Univ. of California, Irvine. He is author
of several textbooks on embedded systems and digital design. His current
research interests include creating technologies for cyber-physical
systems http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~vahid/digitalmockups/), developing
customizable assistive monitoring systems for home-alone aging/disabled
persons and their caretakers
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~vahid/assistivemonitoring/,  and creating the
next generation of online interactive animated learning material
(http://pcpp.zyante.com).

Host: 		Eli Bozorgzadeh, Department of Computer Science



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