EMBS Design Contest 2018

Once more, it is time to report on the annual EMBS Design Contest. This year, four teams worked against the clock to implement, test and deploy a simple multihop wireless communication protocol delivering packets across the Computer Science building, from the hardward labs all the way to my office.

And just like last year, we had a winning team completing the task in less than two hours and a honourable mention finishing only a few minutes later. So, following our tradition, the winning team got a box of chocolates and their picture here in the blog:

And as we did last year, we allow a smaller photo of the honourable mention team:

And to close the report, links to the pictures of the top teams from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2011 and 2010 (in 2013, no group managed to finish the task).

Best Paper Award at DATE 2018

Last year, I wrote in this blog about my major disappointments with the academic peer review system, motivated by a series of reviews that I judged unfair and biased and that prevented an interesting piece of research (jointly authored by myself, Alan Burns and Borislav Nikolic) from being published. Now I am happy to report that the work has been accepted and presented at the top European conference in design automation of electronic and embedded systems (DATE 2018), and it has received the best paper award in the conference's Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems track. DATE 2018 received 766 paper submissions and had over 1000 registered attendees, which further boosts the importance of the paper acceptance and the award.

This doesn't make it easier to accept the peer review flaws we had to go through, but at least it enables the publication of the work and a better definition of the current state-of-the-art in the area of priority-preemptive wormhole networks.

A pre-print of the paper can be found in the White Rose repository.