Mr Damian Dimmich
Research Student
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Publications
My publications are available from the Computer Science department publications repository.
PhD Project Summary
Research Interests
I am a member of the following research groups:
My main interests are in research and development surrounding occam-pi, a concurrent language based on the CSP and pi-calculus. In the first year of my PhD I was looking at creating a viable graphics subsystem for occam-pi. In order to accomplish this I wrote an occam-pi module for the Swig framework. A patch for a recent revision of swig is available. The patch adds a module which allows one to generate wrappers for arbitrary C libraries for occam/occam-pi. Bindings for the SDL and OpenGL libraries have been created, as well as bindings to the Player/Stage robotics API/Simulation libraries and framework. Please see the swig/occam page for details.
Furthermore, I am interested in robots and occam running on them. I help out with an extracurricular activity for students called 'cool stuff in computer science' - cs-cs. I am heavily involved in the Transterpreter project, which is a virtual machine designed to run occam programs. The vm runs on all kinds of platforms including the Lego Mindstorms, Mac's, Pc's with Windows or any unix system, sparc's, mips and so on. Currently I am trying to get it to run on my phone (a Nokia series 60).
I am also activley working on a port of the transterpreter for the Cell processor which will be/is the heart of the Sony Playstation III. I am looking at adding support for vector primitives to the occam-pi language to be able to harness the Cell's preformance. Furthermore I hope to develop the transterpreter runtime to support process mobility, allowing a programmer to write code that is able to migrate to SPU processor nodes when needed.