My (biased) Perspective on CPS, a panel talk by Chenyang Lu in Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS) 2011.

Do What Works, Not What’s Satisfying: Pseudo-Striving and our Fear of Reality-Based Planning, a blog post by Calvin Newport.

Talks to Teachers – on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. A couple of small points, a book by William James in 1899. There is also a PDF version of the book available here.

Some interesting papers in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) April 2012:

• A Hierarchical Thread Scheduler and Register File for Energy-Efficient Throughput Processors, the journal version of the ISCA 2011 and Microarchitecture 2011 papers.
• Fairness via Source Throttling: A Configurable and High-Performance Fairness Substrate for Multicore Memory Systems.
• Leveraging Core Specialization via OS Scheduling to Improve Performance on Asymmetric Multicore Systems

Xilinx introduces the Vivado design tool in its press release. According to the press release and the product page, the Vivado will support 7-series and Zynq devices but not the old devices, while the ISE will support all the existing devices and old devices but seems to be fading out in the future.

A Universal Method to Produce Low–Work Function Electrodes for Organic Electronics, in Science April 2012.

The robot revolution is just beginning, in MIT News. The Heartland Robotics founded by Rodney Brooks was also mentioned in The Economist last week.

The Impact of Process Technology on Kepler’s Efficiency, in the official Blog of NVIDIA.

High-Speed Trading: My Laser Is Faster Than Your Laser, in Bloomberg Businessweek. The latest arm race in the financial world. Related articles:

• Algorithmic Trading, in IEEE Computer Nov. 2011.
• How High-Frequency Trading Is Changing Wall Street, in NPR Jan. 2011.

Making chips to probe genes, an old article in IEEE Spectrum Mar. 2001.

Universal Principles for Ultra Low Power and Energy Efficient Design, in Transactions on Circuits and Systems II (TCSII) April 2012.

Some interesting papers in Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) May 2012:

• Rigid-Motion-Invariant Classification of 3-D Textures
• Sparse Representations for Range Data Restoration
• Rotation-Invariant Nonrigid Point Set Matching in Cluttered Scenes
• Depth From Motion and Optical Blur With an Unscented Kalman Filter
• Scale-Invariant Features for 3-D Mesh Models
• Scale-Invariant Features and Polar Descriptors in Omnidirectional Imaging
• A Unified Feature and Instance Selection Framework Using Optimum Experimental Design

Mean Shift-Based Defect Detection in Multicrystalline Solar Wafer Surfaces, in Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII) Feb. 2011.

Papers on multi-rate control:

• A general formulation for generating multi-rate models, in ACC 2003.
• Multi-rate Visual Servoing Based on Dual-Rate High Order Holds, in Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) 2011.

Some recent papers in Progress in Photovoltaics (PIP):

• Photovoltaics literature survey (no. 92)
• Photovoltaics literature survey (No. 93)
• Advanced alignment technique for precise printing over selective emitter in c-Si solar cells, from Applied Materials.
• Recent progress and future aspects of organic solar cells

Off topic:
Tooling Up: You Will Never Be Appreciated, By David G. Jensen, in Science Career Magazine April 20, 2012.

A random collection of papers on hierarchical control, multi-rate control and sensor fusion:

• Multi-rate fusion with vision and inertial sensors, in ICRA 2004.
• Hierarchical multi-rate control design for constrained linear systems, in CDC 2010.
• 1-ms sensory-motor fusion system, in TMECH 2000.
• A Hierarchical Control Architecture for High-Speed Visual Servoing, in International Journal of Robotics Research 2003.