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Sarah Thompson's Personal Wiki
Welcome to my personal Wiki pages.
Academic visitors may be most interested in my publications.
Art/photography-type-people might be interested in my photography pages, and possibly also in my free Photoshop plugins.
Friends, family and cyberstalkers might prefer my picture gallery and my personal blog on LiveJournal. I also have a second, more traditional blog, FindAtlantis (which isn't really in use currently). I must also own up to having a Facebook, too.
Contents |
Who am I?
Always a good question, that one. :-)
Currently, I am a Staff Scientist in the Robust Software Engineering group at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. In my spare time, Photography tends to be my main obsession.
Research Interests
My PhD work was in the area of aerospace electronics, with applications in radiation hardening (SEEs/SEUs/SETs/permanent latch-up) and reconfigurable spacecraft systems. Much of my work was theoretical -- I introduced a transitional logic capable of supporting mathematical reasoning about asynchronous behaviour in digital circuits, and also did some work in hardware partial evaluation. My thesis introduced the term achronous analysis as a catch-all description for analyses that rely upon abstracting away details of relative timing.
My current work is mostly associated with software model checking, though I retain active interests in other areas, particularly reconfigurable systems and radiation hardening. In my spare time I continue to plug away at the transitional logic idea, with an aim to extending it to deal more accurately with cases where partial causal information exists -- I am hoping that this new version of the theory will lead to a semi-achronous transitional logic that retains the power of the existing logic, whilst allowing causal relationships to be modeled precisely.
Recent Photography
Split Rock, Joshua Tree National Monument
Super Angulon 90mm, f/16, Cambo Legend 4x5, Better Light Super-6K with infrared low pass filter.
I am currently working on...
I am recently back from the arctic, where I was working on a NASA/CSA/Mars Institute project near the magnetic north pole. Specifically, I'm responsible for a good proportion of the software for the DAME (Drilling Automation for Mars Exploration) project. The Haughton Mars Project web site has quite a bit of background on this if you're interested. If you look really closely at the logs for the right webcam at the right moment, you might just see me eating my breakfast. :-)
Open Source Projects
I have a number of past projects that I intend to make available on an open source basis:
- sigslot -- C++ signal/slot library that exists as a single header file, and which provides Qt-like facilities. [Documentation (pdf), Downloads]. Licence: Free for use for any purpose
- Telergy -- Real-time text retrieval, messaging and queueing system.
Note that the free Photoshop plugins are currently closed-source due to the terms of Adobe's Photoshop SDK License agreement. I do hope to release their core algorithms here eventually, however.
Other Stuff
(This is mostly relevant just to myself)
- My Schedule -- an (incomplete) list of upcoming work-related engagements.
- Conferences -- links to upcoming conference web sites
- To Do Lists -- my to-do lists (probably of interest only to myself)
- Technical HOWTOs -- Stuff that I've figured out how to do, that I'd prefer not to forget about, and that might be useful to others.
- Squeeee
- Lolcoffee
- HMP
- Recipes
