Website www.dfki.de

Synopsis Founded in 1988, DFKI today is one of the largest nonprofit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. DFKI is focusing on the complete cycle of innovation - from world-class basic research and technology development through leading-edge demonstrators and prototypes to product functions and commercialization.

When Feb '99 - Feb '01

Role I was employed to develop a model of emotion and personality for web-based Avatar presentation agents written in Java. Other activities conducted at DFKI included the automatic analysis of Web pages for context sensitive data mining of price information, and writing proposals for EU initiatives. In addition to project work, I gave talks, presented papers and posters, and peer-reviewed articles for conferences and publications.

Talks

Talk on DFKI's Presentation Agent project (1999) Presentation.pdf

Papers

Allen, S. (2000). Control States and Motivated Agency. In E. André (Ed.) Behavior Planning for Life-Like Characters and Avatars: Proceeding of the i3 Spring Days '99 Workshop. pages 43-61. March 1999, Sitges, Spain. Paper.pdf

André, E., Klesen M., Gebhard, P., Allen, S., and Rist, T. (1999). Integrating Models of Personality and Emotions into Lifelike Characters. To appear in A. Paiva (Ed.) Affect in Interactions Towards a New Generation of Interfaces. Paper.pdf

Website Cognition And Affect Project

Synopsis The main goal of the Cognition and Affect project is to understand the types of architectures that are capable of accounting for the whole range of human (and non-human) mental states and processes, including not only intelligent capabilities, such as the ability to learn to find your way in an unfamiliar town and the ability to think about infinite sets, but also moods, emotions, desires, and the like. For instance, we have investigated whether the ability to have emotional states is an accident of animal evolution or an inevitable consequence of design requirements and constraints, for instance in resource-limited intelligent robots.

When Nov '95 - Feb '99

Role For my thesis I investigated how concerns - dispositions to desire the occurrence or non-occurrence of a given kind of situation - are processed at the different levels of an autonomous agent architecture and how they relate to other control states such as beliefs, intentions, goals, and desires.

Talks

Talk on "Emotions, Personality and other Woolly Concepts" (2000) Presentation.pdf

Papers

Allen, S. (2001). Concern Processing in Autonomous Agents. Submitted PhD Thesis, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham. Thesis.pdf (1.4MB) or Overview.pdf

Allen, S. (2000). A Concern-Centric Society-Of-Mind Approach To Mind Design. In Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium on How To Design A Functioning Mind. April 2000, Birmingham, England. Paper.pdf

Schillo, M., Allen, S., Fischer, K., Klein, C. (2000). Socially Competent Business Agents With Attitude: Using Habitus-Field Theory to Design Agents with Social Competence. In Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium on Starting from Society - The Application of Social Analogies to Computational Systems. April 2000, Birmingham, England. Paper.pdf

Website www.cambridgeconsultants.com

Synopsis Cambridge Consultants is a world-renowned product and technology developer, working for a global client base in a wide range of industries including: medical technology, wireless communication, automotive, transport, energy, consumer products, industrial products and defence. The majority of the company's business is fee-for-service development work, however it also invests in its own intellectual property (IP) which is then acquired or licensed by clients. On occasion this IP investment is used to form a new corporate venture or spin-out and is one of the central pillars behind what is known as the Cambridge Phenomenon or Silicon Fen. Alphamosaic span out of Cambridge Consultants in April 2001.

When Nov '90 - Sept '95

Role Engineer

Details Click on any of the products on the right for more details.

Website wikipedia link

Synopsis High Level Hardware Ltd was a British manufacture of the Orion range 32-bit minicomputers designed and produced in the 1980s. The original Orion (sometimes referred to as the "microcoded Orion") employed a processor architecture based on Am2900-series devices. This processor was novel in that its microcode was writeable; in other words, its instruction set could be redefined. This facility was used to customise some Orions with instruction sets optimised for functional programming. Later, HLH launched the Orion 1/05, which replaced the microcoded CPU with the much faster Fairchild Clipper RISC processor. HLH abandoned the hardware market in the early 1990s and concentrated on high-end Apple Macintosh sales.

When Jun '86 - Jun '90

Role Summer Student

Product Brief BCM2727.pdf

Press Release New VideoCore® III solution

Details Launched in October 2007, Broadcom's third generation VideoCore product shattered three mobile multimedia records with a single device: 720p HD Video (H264 and MPEG4), 12 Megapixel Camera (144 Mpixels/s processing), and 3D Gaming (32 million triangles/s). In a break from the earlier designs, the BCM2727 makes extensive use of dedicated HW blocks to augment its programmable 2D vector cores (it contains two enhanced VideoCoreII engines). The HW blocks provide a pipelined data-flow structure to achieve industry leading power-performance figures, with the VideoCore engines providing the processing for the OpenGL 2.0 programmable shaders, the audio codecs, specialist ISP functions, and the middleware.

Role With a bigger team, my main contribution was ensuring that things came together smoothly, the design met requirements, and that nothing fell through the gaps. My primary focus was software and system architecture, however I also looked after the validation and verification environment, running sims, and building FPGAs so that we had something to develop our software on.

Product Brief BCM2702.pdf and BCM2722.pdf (stacked with 32MB SDRAM)

Press Release New VideoCore® processors

Details launched in September 2004, the second generation VideoCore added TV out, VGA video, H264 support and 3x the processing power of the first generation product. The stacked BCM2722 was launched in October 2005.

Role In addition to looking after the Product Software group I also responsible for writing the camera and display peripherals, looking after FPGA builds, and driving the verification effort.

Product Brief BCM2722.pdf

Details The 5th Gen iconic MP3 player from Apple was launched in October 2005 with the video handled by the BCM2722 multimedia coprocessor. The video capabilities were upgraded to VGA H264 via a software update a year later as part of the 5.5G refresh.

Role Product Software Group Leader

Details A single-chip low power Video/Multimedia programmable solution providing CIF 30fps MPEG4 camcorder (54mW), Multi-megapixel stills camera, Graphics accelerator, MP3/AAC player (25mW), Video player (MPEG4/H263), 3D Games, MIDI, SMAF, and ringtones all in software. VC01 taped out with an engineering (hw/sw/systems) team of just 15 people.

Role During this period I wrote the architecture spec, the verilog for a couple of the peripherals, the odd software module, looked after debug - sitting on the hardware/software technical committees of the IEEE ISTO 5001, and managed the early customer engagements with our FPGA-based development kit.

Details The VideoCore Multimedia Coprocessor Software (VMCS) framework provides all the components needed to play, create, and edit multimedia content on a mobile device. The software package includes support for all the leading audio and video codecs, file handlers, and streaming protocols, as well as audio and video special effects, sophisticated camera ISP, and both vector and 3D graphics engines.

Role In September 2003 I took on the role of group leader for the newly formed Product Software Group with responsibilities for defining the software architecture, future feature set, resource management, software releases, recruitment, staff reviews, and staff career development.

Details In addition to the standard multimedia phone features, this model added Satellite TV broadcast with DMB (Digitial Multimedia Broadcasting) support and TV out.

SCH-v420 was launched in October 2003 supporting CIF 15 fps encode; 64MByte Multimedia Flash filing system; MPEG4, EVRC, AAC, MP4; Megapixel stills; MemoryStick Duo and Pictures & Borders

SCH-v490 was launched in early 2004 adding MP3 Jukebox, 2 Megapixel camera, digital Zoom, and QVGA 30 fps encode.

SCH-v540 was launched in early 2004 adding VOD (Video On Demand), MOD (Movie On Demand), and 3D stereo speakers

SCH-v450 was launched in mid 2004 adding 3D Games.

Other phones containing VC01 include the Samsung models SCH-v4200, SCH-X699, and SGH-P730/735 along with the 02 X3 and BenQ S700.

Role I managed numerous integration and development projects with Far-Eastern partner companies and acted as a project reviewer for projects run by members of my team. The team and I got to know Seoul airport and Gumi very well during this time.

Hilti Ferroscan CCL developed a novel approach to embedded software development. The product's user interface and underlying architecture is first simulated in a high-level environment to give rapid prototyping and physical confirmation of product specification. Once the specification is fixed, the simulation is trans-coded to give the actual embedded software for the final product. Within the context of this development cycle, I wrote the multi-tasking system and device-driver software for the Ferroscan imaging and measurement instrument.

XAP Assembler CCL developed its own Low Power RISC processor, called the XAP (XAP ASIC Processor), for use in embedded applications. The XAP processor, and tool chain, was later adopted by Cambridge Silicon Radio as the embedded processor for their first Bluetooth chips, and commercialised by Cyan Technologies with their eCOG1k processor. I specified, designed and coded the Macro Assembler for the XAP processor. The assembler was used as the main tool in software development, both as a stand alone product, and by providing the back-end to the XAP 'C' compiler.

Unipath Persona is a natural method of contraception that identifies the fertile days of a woman's cycle. Persona works by monitoring the changes in hormones (luteinising hormone and estrogen) which control a woman's cycle and identifies the days when she is at significant risk of becoming pregnant. I was part of the initial feasibility study, and stayed with the projects through to final product design, writing all the embedded software (excluding algorithms) and looking after many of the experiments.

Other Projects I wrote the user interface specification, simulation and final code for the Philips EasyLine FS900 high-end separates tuner-amplifier

Other Roles In addition to my technical roles, I was also heavily involved in writing project proposals, setting up projects, defining tasks, controlling the budget, liaising with clients, and general day to day running of the project.