Project Title	Brief Description
Qualitative Reasoning : Modeling and Reasoning about Incomplete Qualitative Temporal Information Advisor: Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti Link : Thesis	In this work, we propose a novel formal model which can conveniently model a complex environment with large numbers of states in a simple and concise manner. We model a dynamic system in terms of objects which are passive entities possessing certain qualitative properties and processes which capture the change in these properties. The model is based on qualitative calculus which allows a flexible representation of only the information that is available and actually needed. It is targeted towards representation of physical phenomena taught at school and college levels, so as to act as an aid for teaching and understanding of the basics of physics.
Physical Design of QCA circuits Collaborators: Mayur Bubna, Subhra Mazumdar, Naresh Shenoy, Rajib Mall Links: 1. A layout-aware physical design method for constructing feasible QCA circuits 2. Designing Cellular Automata Structures using Quantum-dot Cellular Automata	1. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is an emerging computing paradigm, in which logical operations as well as signal transmission occurs due to Coulombic charge interaction between neighbouring QCA cells, moderated by a 4-phase QCA clock potential. Thermodynamic constraints like the number of QCA cells in a clocking zone must be obeyed to obtain a logically correct and feasible QCA circuit. These constraints depend on various design factors like total wirelength in a circuit, height of a clocking zone etc. which are not available until actual circuit layout is obtained. In this paper, the various design automation problems assosciated with obtaining a feasible QCA layout are addressed. The layout generation problem is formulated as embedding the netlist digraph in an orthogonal grid, which provides an abstraction of the actual physical layout to be obtained. Novel graph theoretic algorithms are proposed to perform placement and global routing and various design parameters like clock rate, wasted area and total wirelength are used to estimate the quality of the layout obtained. Also, planarization methods are used to remove all wire crossings, which are expensive to fabricate. The methods applied on a large number of MCNC'93 and ISCAS'89 benchmarks show good results. 2. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a promising, emerging nanotechnology based on single electron effects in quantum dots and molecules. While many logic implementations based on QCA devices have been proposed in literature, the inherent cellular structure of QCA cells make it a natural candidate for Cellular Automata (CA) implementation. CA offers regularity and modularity to the design which helps to mitigate the susceptibility of QCA cells to manufacturing defects. Also, pipelining is an inherent property of QCA computation which is essential for CA operation. This work is first reported work to the best of our knowledge, towards realization of CA structures using QCA logic cells. We give detailed schematic of some typical CA rules implemented using QCA. Also, QCA implementation of a Programmable Cellular Automata (PCA) has been developed. A pseudorandom sequence generator is developed using the proposed PCA.
Transactional Support for Scalable Games Language (SGL) Advisor: Prof. Johannes Gehrke, Alan Demers, Walker White	With Alan Demers, Prof. Gehrke and his student Ben Sowell, we analyzed the problems associated with the addition of transactions to SGL and proposed frameworks with different consistency guarantees.
Vehicle License Plate Extraction and Recognition Advisor: Prof. Thambipillai Srikanthan, Mr. Ravi Satzoda, Mrs. Suchitra Sathyanarayana Link : Technical Report	The objective of the project was to design a portable hand held camera which can be used to identify license plates. It was intended to simulate the design on software before considering the hardware implementation. This report highlights the software implementation of the design keeping in mind the hardware constraints (both area and time). In view of this it was intended to use a single engine for both the extraction and recognition purposes. Since the Hough transform has an easy implementation in terms of hardware (using CORDIC arithmetic), and the font used in license plates more or less consists of straight lines, which are highlighted as peaks in the hough domain, an attempt was made to develop the LPRS using hough engine.