Two papers on design space exploration using architecture template:

• PICO: automatically designing custom computers, from HP, in Computer 2002.
• Architecture exploration for a reconfigurable architecture template, from IMEC, in Design and Test of Computers 2005.

Some papers on platform based design:

• A framework for comparing models of computation, by Edward Lee and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, in TCAD 1998.
• Cathedral-II: A Silicon Compiler for Digital Signal Processing, from IMEC, in Design & Test of Computers 1986.

Some interesting papers in Jan 2011 issue of CACM:

• Nonlinear systems made easy, but still difficult.
• The touchy subject of haptics, from the view of a computer scientist.
• An interview with Frances E. Allen, who has been working on auto-parallelization. Her career is quite different compared to other Turing award winners.
• Using simple abstraction to reinvent computing for parallelism, the Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) architecture claims better performance per area than GPU on irregular workload, and slightly worse on regular workload.
• Sora promises lasting impact: technical perspective, touting the “worse is better” philosophy.
• Sora: high-performance software radio using general-purpose multi-core processors, from SOftware RAdio project of Microsoft research.

Off topic:
KinectHacks.net, a website collecting new applications based on the kinect. A cool demo is using Kinect as a front-end of mikumikudance, a software to synthesis the choreography of Hatsune Miku.
The most intriguing and top 10 HBR posts of 2010.

Two interesting papers in Dec 2010 issue of ACM Transactions on Computing Systems:

• Contention-Aware Scheduling on Multicore Systems
• Load Balancing Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems

Some interesting papers in Signal Processing Magazine Jan 2011:

• Immersive Visual Communication, from UIUC.
• Free-Viewpoint TV, from Nagoya-U.

A survey on vision-based human action recognition, by Ronald Poppe from Twente.

Off topic:
Lose language to think outside the box. Language seems to limit creativity in some way.

The slides of Hot Chips 2010 was released.

Real Time Motion Capture Using a Single Time-Of-Flight Camera, by Vanrun Ganapathi, et al., in CVPR 2010. The TOF body tracking is accelerated by GPU.

Some recent papers in Computer Journal:

• On Using Physical Analogies for Feature and Shape Extraction in Computer Vision
• Compiling C-like Languages to FPGA Hardware: Some Novel Approaches Targeting Data Memory Organization

Off topic:
Your Boss is Your Client (& Your Colleagues Are Too)

Accurate hardware-based stereo vision, in j.cviu 2010.

Off topic:
Word Lens on iPhone, augmented reality finally gets a killer app.

New VLSI Tools, by Daniel Gajski and Robert Kuhn, in IEEE Computer 1983. The famous Gajski-Kuhn Y-chart was introduced.

Revisiting SIMD Programming, from Cambridge and Clearspeed, in 2007. The programming model does not utilize the neighbourhood communication network, as called ring network, in the Clearspeed CSX architecture.

EuroBen releases reports on supercomputers every year. The report covers CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators, for example, the clearspeed.

Some interesting preprints in TIP:

• A Uniform Framework for Estimating Illumination Chromaticity, Correspondence and Specular Reflection
• No-Reference Blur Assessment of Digital Pictures Based On Multi-Feature Classifiers
• Quality Assessment of De-blocked Images
• Studentized Dynamical System for Robust Object Tracking
• Face Recognition by Exploring Information Jointly in Space, Scale and Orientation

Off topic:
Solaris Alternatives, a website against the Solaris operating system.