Harald has posted a summary of the State of the Map conference, the first OpenStreetMap Foundation conference. It took place in Manchester in mid July, and was an interesting, inspiring and enjoyable event.

Østfold University College participated with three teams at DTU Robocup 2007. The teams were Tigergutt, Team Monica, and Bug.

Tigergutt

Team members: Steinar Auensen, Jostein Bratlie, Kristin Larsen, Patrick S. Johannessen, and T. Sang Tran.

Results: 2 points in the qualification (14th place), and 2 points in the final (15th place).

Team Monica

Team members: Aleksander Toppe, Anders Reier, Dag Thomas Olsen, and Ole André Bakken.

Results: 11 points in the qualification (5th place), and 8 points in the final (7th place). 

Bug 

Team members: Sizarta Sarshar and Jan Vidar Gundersen.

Results: 10 points in the qualification (7th place), and 5 points in the final (10th place).

In late June the master students Espen Talberg, John Simensen and Sizarta Sarshar presented scientific papers at the ESREL Safety and Reliability conference. ESREL is an annual conference and probably the most important conference on safety and reliability in Europe. This year there were about 400 participants at the onference which lasted three days.

The papers presented by the students were:

The first paper proposed a methodology for using source code to determine whether one process might adversely affect other processes running on the same CPU. By applying the well-known Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) on system calls the proposed method enables criteria to be defined that will make it possible to automatically analyse a given source code for error propagation issues. In the second paper, it was documented that there is both a lack of reliability methods specifically suited for adaptable autonomous systems (such as robots), and that even in high-profile projects such as the finalists in 2005 Grand Challenge (also known as the DARPA Rally) there is very little focus on systematic reliability analysis.

The students’ work was done as part of their MSc-projects under the supervision of associate professor Rune Winther. The paper on error propagation was written in cooperation with the Institute for energy technology in Halden. Although these papers where written as part of MSc-projects they were accepted as regular scientific papers and thus subjected to the same acceptance criteria as all the other researchers that published papers at the conference. It is also worth mentioning that the master students from HIØ were the only master students present at the ESREL conference.

Reseachers in the Mobile Applications Group were involved in five papers at the ESREL conference.

Happy young researchers! From left to right: Sizarta Sarshar, Espen
Talberg, and John Simensen.