Alberto Jimenez M.Sc.

Projects and Responsibilities

• Project: AutoImmune Inc. Clinical Trial. Feb 1996 - Sept 1997.
• Reponsibilities: Production Control Software (PCS):
  
  At the Brain Imaging Center of the Montreal Neurological Institute a software technology called ALQUA (Automated Lesion Quantification) has been developed to conduct volumetric measurements of brain formations ( e.g. Multiple Sclerosis lesions ) with a high degree of precision.
  
  This technology has been used successfully in the AutoImmune (AI) , Neurocrine Bioscience (NBI), and other projects to measure and correlate the changes of brain lesions in a group of patients participating in these drug tests. (The goal of the AutoImmune project is to test the effect of a new drug for the cure of Multiple Sclerosis).
  
  PCS has been created with the objective of conducting the production phase of these projects in an efficient and orderly fashion. The involvement and constant feedback and effort from the part of all members of the McConnell BIC helped PCS evolve into a tool useful even outside the context in which it was first conceived.
  
  PCS is a group of Perl procedures and executables capable of executing according to a user-supplied configuration file written in a quasi-Perl syntax . In this configuration file the user specifies the sequence of jobs to be executed and if there is parallelism between those jobs that can also be easily expressed.
  
  In addition, PCS maintains a database in order to store status information about each user jobs. This database is also used by the PCS internals to achieve user-jobs synchronization, etc. The database facility can be used by user programs as well to store any information in the form of records.
  
  Due to requirements of these clinical trials the measurements must be reliable and reproducible. PCS has been conceived to support these demands too. It does so by storing, together with the result of each experiment (indexed by a combination of patient id, time, etc), the version of the software that was used to obtain those results. Later, if the same experiment is to be reproduced the correct software version can be extracted. The latter requires the use of a third-party version control system ( e.g. CVS ); it is not and integral part of PCS .
  
  Since it was developed with other projects in mind it is also highly configurable. Therefore, it is posible to use it in many types of projects by performing only moderate modifications. Its easy to understand and flexible configuration scheme makes worth using it even for ocassional tasks. If parallelism is desired PCS is a good candidate for very simple programming ( if at all ) is required to achieve it.
  
  PCS currently runs on a IRIX 5.3/6.4 workstations cluster, running "batch" a freely available tool in charge of jobs management similar to the UNIX command "at". Due to its database feature, to run PCS it is required to install the database package mSQL .
  
  
• Project: EARTH 1994-1995
• Responsibilities: Porting the Paraffin Benchmark onto EARTH (Efficient Architecture for Running THreads) a novell Multithreaded Architecture.
  
  This porting is useful to asses the efficiency of this architecture and compare it with that of available architectures. The measurements done with this benchmark helped to obtain detailed information about the time-cost incurred by different architectural features.
  
  Some of the tasks performed by EARTH are listed below (:->)
  1. Save the environment each time a new thread of production is started
  2. Reuse (recycling) threads through the thread queue
  3. Keep the balance of resources.
  4. Manufacture paraffins fast. How fast?
  

Subjects of interest

1. Parallel Computer Systems and Algorithms; cost-efficiency, programmability, Fault Tolerance, etc.
2. Knowledge-based systems.
3. Probability and Signal Processing.

Other very interesting areas

1. Parallel Distributed Processing
2. Artificial Intelligence, Brain Modelling, Ergodic Theory
   
3. Formal theories, undecidable questions, mechanical theorem proving, algorithmically solvable problems (work of Herbrand, Skolem, J. von Neumman, Godel, Turing, Church, N. Wiener, Chaitin , etc)
4. Conventional and less-conventional fields of
   Cybernetics (Cyborgs, man-machine symbiotic interactions, etc)
   

   The computer history and evolution to our days.

   Un-answered questions about ancient egyptian civilizations.
   
   

Favorite Links

Overview of Principia Cybernetica

CLIPS: A tool for building expert systems

Lab pictures

WebCLIPS: A tool for building expert systems