Event Horizon blog series
BlogFebruary 28, 2020
Hello and welcome to Event Horizon, my periodic blog about embedded technologies, defense systems, and anything generally tech-related that I might find interesting (and hopefully you as well). I’d like to thank the kind folks at OpenSystems Media, and especially John McHale, Editorial Director at Military Embedded Systems Magazine for giving me a little space where I can muse on various topics that strike my interests.
For those of you who do not know me, I have worked my entire career (some 30 years now) in and around embedded computing in one form or another. Currently I'm Vertical Product Manager for Defense at Kontron America, so in light of full disclosure I will, from time to time, talk about things related to my work at Kontron. When I touch on such topics I’ll make it a point to mention my role at Kontron so to hopefully avoid obvious conflicts of interest.
In addition to my product management work at Kontron, I have been very involved in the Sensor Open Systems Architecture, or SOSA technical standard effort. With SOSA we are defining a standard to ease the problem of designing, integrating, and later upgrading complex defense sensor platforms. SOSA will guide suppliers in creating products that are compatible and easily integrate with each other, as well as provide a common architecture and software infrastructure for integrators to quickly create new sensor systems.
I’ll be going more into SOSA and some of the more interesting problems we’re tackling in later blog entries. I also want to touch on subjects such as deep learning for embedded systems and edge computing, autonomous vehicles, platform management, security, and a personal favorite of mine, FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC).
My technical interests are fairly wide. In school I studies control systems engineering and computer vision (I did my masters thesis on a very early neural net problem). At NASA I mainly worked on problems of segmentation and object pose estimation, along with algorithm acceleration through parallelization. Later, I worked on things like high performance embedded computing (HPEC) and FPGA-based computing using VME, Compact PCI, and VPX form factors, moving from traditional air-cooled chassis to more rugged conduction-cooled platforms. Lately I have been working with small integrated mission computers based on standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) modules.
Thanks for joining me, and I hope that you find my blog on the topics above and many others interesting and thought provoking.
