Riscalar is a highly parameterisable, extensible, and modular computer architecture simulation tool designed for the RISC-V ISA. The ability of Riscalar to explore a large design space with configurable pipeline widths, execution orders, functional units, cache sizes, and branch predictors differentiates it from other RISC-V educational simulators. It is capable of simulating user-designed programs through standard cross-compilation tools, and can be used to explore the relationship between processor microarchitecture, compiler optimizations, and program performance. This paper details the design and implementation of Riscalar using Rust, highlighting the abstractions made to implement a cycle-approximate simulator.

This Innovative Practice Category Work-In-Progress paper describes the innovative way in which a course on hardware/software codesign was conducted fully online during a near-lockdown necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A novel remote lab setup was established in a very limited time, which was used to ensure that students were able to achieve hands-on experience through a project in spite of the course being taught fully online. Students could run the development environment on their own computers and needed to access the online lab setup only for running their program on the actual hardware, which was connected to a light server with the serial and programming ports forwarded over the internet. Lab exercises were modified appropriately to fit the constraints imposed by the remote setup while not compromising on the rigor and desirable course learning outcomes. A wiki-based platform was used for the dissemination of information, scaffolding, collaboration, as well as booking of slots to access the remote lab setup. Zoom video conferencing tool was used for consultations as well as evaluations. The results are encouraging, with students satisfied with the experience gained, without having to compromise on practical knowledge. This opens up the potential to implement such remote lab-based hands-on projects in MOOCs and continuing education scenarios to enhance student learning.

Over the past several years, the electrocardiogram (ECG) has been investigated for its uniqueness and potential to discriminate between individuals. This paper discusses how this discriminatory information can help in continuous user authentication by a wearable chest strap which uses dry electrodes to obtain a single lead ECG signal. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first such work which deals with continuous authentication using a genuine wearable device as most prior works have either used medical equipment employing gel electrodes to obtain an ECG signal or have obtained an ECG signal through electrode positions that would not be feasible using a wearable device. Prior works have also mainly dealt with using the ECG signal for identification rather than verification, or dealt with using the ECG signal for discrete authentication. This paper presents a novel algorithm which uses QRS detection, weighted averaging, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to determine whether the wearer of the device should be positively verified or not. Zero intrusion attempts were successful when tested on a database consisting of 33 subjects.

This innovative practice category work in progress paper describes a project in a final-year un-dergraduate course on implementing a neural accelerator on an FPGA for edge computing. In our university, an undergraduate course on Embedded Hardware System Design introduces students to advanced hardware design techniques with the goal of integrating the created hardware into a complete system. Students learn concepts such as high-level synthesis (HLS), logic synthesis and physical design, with an emphasis on FPGA-based designs. They also understand bus systems such as Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) to interconnect the various components. The concepts are put into practice through a project. A series of labs provide scaffolding to students through the course of implementing the project. These labs take students systematically through an introduction to hardware-software co-design, hardware design, creation and interfacing of custom co-processors and HLS. Important hardware design and optimization concepts, as well as managing the data interaction between hardware and software were reinforced through the project. The project also provided many students with the opportunity to be introduced to neural networks and machine learning (ML). Quantitative and qualitative results from a survey indicate that students gained a lot of knowledge and experience through the course of the project. The current form of the project streams in data from a local computer to which the FPGA is connected. Future work includes true and direct cloud connectivity and improved use cases for making it a true Internet of Things (IoT) project.

This Innovative Practice category Full Paper presents the use of a state-of-the-art research problem for a capstone project for third year computer engineering students. In our university, students were given the opportunity to work on a cutting edge problem - indoor navigation systems for the visually impaired. Indoor navigation is challenging because GPS signals cannot be received indoors. It is an area where a large amount of research is ongoing, and hundreds of scientific papers are published every year. For a successful implementation of the system, students had to draw on their knowledge of all the computer engineering concepts, ranging from digital electronic circuits, microprocessors, real-time systems, data structures and algorithms, software engineering, computer networking etc. In addition, students had to evaluate and adopt techniques from existing literature, and adapt them to meet the problem requirements. Thus, the project reinforced their knowledge of fundamentals, while exposing them to a problem with no obvious solution. The main evaluation was conducted as a competition, where students were blindfolded and were required to navigate between two indoor locations. Their system had to download the maps from a server, compute the optimal route to the destination, and students had to navigate there based only on voice and/or haptic commands provided by their system. Some constraints were imposed to ensure that the problem did not get trivialized and accurately represented a real-world scenario. Quantitative and qualitative results from the module feedback surveys showed significant improvement over the previous capstone project. The surveys indicate that the nature of the project and the evaluation process provided adequate challenge and excitement to students, while facilitating effective learning. Students were able to exercise their creativity, and come up with a number of interesting positioning techniques. Such a project ensured that the learning process cemented their understanding of subject fundamentals while addressing a novel research problem that is current, and has a potentially huge societal and commercial impact.