Our lab - Samsung America's Advanced Software platform Lab - together with Mozilla and Microsoft have kick-started a new event/conference dedicated exclusively to web gaming. It will be on March the 13th 2014 in Issy-les-moulieneaux, France, just south of Paris.The idea here is to create a point of discussion and discovery around the challenges, opportunities and technologies available to push web gaming towards new frontiers. This is the first edition and we hope to see a lot of you there.We will have 2 speakers there: Daniel Glazman - in the opening keynote - and Swaroop Kalasapur from our platform acceleration team will talk about webCL and its direct application to gaming. Our lab will also participate to the roundtable discussion at the end of the sessionAttendance is open and free but registration is required. There are only a limited amount of seats for this first edition (~250).Check you the detail schedule here: http://www.nextgamefrontier.com/more info with those links:http://goo.gl/maps/g1iA8http://lanyrd.com/2014/ngf2014/http://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-next-game-frontier-10408182153Thanks for to Daniel and Satheesh for organizing this on our side.

Our team has just released an add-on to the Tizen SDK 2.2.1 that provides support for OpenCL for ARM CPU and webCL - see https://developer.tizen.org/downloads/add-on-sdks#opencl
OpenCL is an open standard from the Khronos Group defining to API's and a programing model to enable parallel computing on heterogeneous platforms (multi-core CPUs, GPGPU). WebCL- also specified by the Khronos group  -  defines the JavaScript bindings to OpenCL and allows web app developers to use the acceleration provided by OpenCL. Those API's should allow application developers to improve application performance by exploiting the parallelism of multi-core processor, it is particularly tailored for computing-intensive tasks, such as image processing, physics simulations, gaming, 3D animation, computational photography, etc... 
The Tizen add-on is our implementation of OpenCL 1.1 for ARM CPU. It works with the Reference Device-PQ (https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Reference_Device-PQ) - also known as the "Tizen developer device" - which hosts a quduad-core ARM A9 processor. The webCL implementation is as close as you can get to the current draft spec. (The specs have not  been ratified yet but Tasneem Brutch - heading the webCL working group on webCL and proud  member of our Lab - tells us that it is getting close).The webCL implementation is a plugin version but we are also working on an integrated version (https://github.com/SRA-SiliconValley/webkit-webcl) - which will have much better performance.
The add-on only supports Linux for now and there are still a few limitations-  for instance related to kernel compilation, so please read the release notes carefully and the developer guide.
This is really just a small step for application developers who want start playing around and experiment with the technology, engage with us on the topic and get a feeling of the things to come. There are only binaries for the moment but the sample apps that comes with it are open.
This is only the beginning - more will come - as always we welcome your input, participation, feedback (please tell us if you encounter bugs or something broken).

Hope you enjoy it

There are quite a few members of my lab who will be presenting talks next week at the LinuxCon North America So it is time to advertise them.
First, we have a couple of a technical tracks scheduled. Tasneem Brutch will be talking about enabling OpenCL acceleration for web applications  (http://sched.co/14Dpx1N). Tasneem is the chair of the Khronos WebCl group and she is a member of my research team working on platform acceleration. Mauro Chehab will give talk on RAS on Linux ( http://sched.co/1aVyGuP ). Mauro is part of our open source group  working in Brazil ( and yes we also have an office in Brazil where we have both an RD and open source team - so if anybody from Brazil wants to contact us, do not hesitate) Finally, Shuah Khan will be presenting a tutorial on cross-compiling Linux Kernel on X86_64 ( http://sched.co/15Nfo6a ).We also have one legal talk by Ibrahim Haddad about open sourcing proprietary technology (http://sched.co/1atg1CW) and as part of the Tizen Mini-summit, Guy Martin  will be presented the Tizen 3.0 Open Governance model together with Thiago Marciera from Intel (http://sched.co/19JGyiw)Hope to see you all there.

In the last few years, JavaScript has become the main tool to build rich web applications. But it has also shown some of its limitation. The nature of the language makes it so that very little tools have been provided to the developer for dynamic analysis.  Last September,  we started a research track to improve productivity of Javascript developers. Professor Koushik Sen from UC Berkeley has been working with our Lab team - to develop a framework to tackle this specific issue. The result is Jalangi. It is short for JAvascript LANguage INtelligence and it is also an Indian river which is a branch of the Ganges.
Jalangi is a framework that annotates and monitors JavaScript programs and can be used for running analysis dealing with validation/monitoring/debugging,etc...It provides a general framework that can be extended with plug-ins.It is already implementing a few analysis tools such as selective record-and-play, taint analysis or the ability to infer likely types of objects fields and functions. More  interestingly, one of the plugin provides the first thorough implementation -as far as we know - of concolic testing for Javascript. Concolic testing is a mixture of  concrete execution (using particular concrete values as inputs) with symbolic execution - which treats program variables as symbolic variables. The symbolic execution piggy-backs on the concrete execution through instrumentalization of  the code. You basically identify through this method what are the concrete input values that allows you to comb through all the branches of the code. It provides a great tool to generate automatic test cases with high level coverage.
Bear in mind that all this is just the beginning, the idea of Jalangi is precisely to provide a framework to foster innovation in the area of JavaScript tools and productivity. There will be more things coming up. I will keep you posted. That is precisely why it has the architecture it has and why it is open source and can be found on github (https://github.com/SRA-SiliconValley/jalangi)
And since it is open source, you are welcome to join the fun and contribute! Send us feedback! Hope you like it.
PS: our team is presenting a paper on some aspects of Jalangi at ESEC/FSE 2013 in August in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

I am looking for Javascript software engineers. You need to have expertise in Javascript, HTML5, CSS,  and high-level programming concepts. Developing experience on  Webkit or Firefox engine as well as a strong understanding of browser rendering is obviously a plus.  You need to be knowledgeable on the common JavaScript Libraries (jQuery, Sencha, Enyo,etc...). This would essentially be to build a team to work on web UX technologies and interfaces.
On a similar subject, I am also looking to expand our research activity around Javascript itself and Javascript tools (first result to come soon). So if you have deeper knowledgeable about the language itself or the frameworks, do not hesitate to contact me as well or meet me at the Tizen developer conference.

The Tizen Developer Conference is coming up from the 22nd of May until the 24th of may 2013 - It is in Downtown San Francisco (https://www.tizen.org/)I will be there the whole 3 days but I might be hard to grab as I will be running around. If you want to touch base - just contact me through linked in, email or twitter (https://twitter.com/yapellet).
If you are going there, go and check out the following talks from my lab (SRA's Advanced Software Platform). One is "Accelerated HTML5 Rendering for the Tizen Platform" by Henry Song. The other is "WebKit for Tizen" by Laszlo Gombos. Both of those talks are on the WebKit track. Though they are litteraly the top of the iceberg when it comes to our activity, it gives you an idea of what some our interests are.

There is also a presentation around a service prototyping for social appointment entitled Rendez-vous  under the Tizen Collaboration Projects. This is presented by Stanford students. It is a small project that we kick-started and sponsored last February as part of the CS210 Stanford Class.
On side note:  Art Dahm is giving a talk about building Tizen apps using Enyo & Phonegap. Art - now working for LG - used to be part of my team working  when I was working on webOS at HP. I will be sure to check this one out to see if I can meet some of the old team :)

See you there.

As mentioned before, we are creating an Open Source department that will focus on key open source technologies.  The Open Source department  is in  Silicon Valley - as part of my Advanced Software Platform organization  in Samsung Research America.But there is also an office in London, UK - as part of Samsung European Research Institute (with a smaller satellite office in Helsinki, Finland).  So if you are also living in those countries and want to be in contact with those guys, you can also send us your CV and we will channel  them  to the relevant offices.We are hiring sw developers on the following: Linux Kernel, Webkit, jQuery, Android, Hadoop, Tizen, EFL, FFMpeg, Gstreamer, LLVM, Cassandra, Cloudstack, HBase, U-boot, WEbinos, Openstack, Chromium OS, Lighttpd, Linaro, Cairo, Node.js, Wayland, and Xen.  This is not an exhaustive list, this list will grow  and we are potentially interested in any open source project that might move the needle - so there is no harm in contacting us anyway - if only to chat.We will support the option to work remotely depending on your personal situation and we are also trying to build some core team here in Silicon Valley.So if you are currently involved in any of these projects/technologies (or similar/related projects) as a contributor, committer, reviewer, maintainer, etc., and enjoy collaborating with the global community of open source developers, you can contact us by going through the site or sending me your CV directly.That is the gist of it – if you want more details (about the content of the job, the requirements, etc…), go to http://careers.us.samsung.com/, enter as location San Jose and as keyword: open source.Thanks

I just tried Graph Search. I was on the waiting list as this was going to be good.  Not good as in useful-good, but good as in just plain fun.
Candy to the mind ..with the possibility to feed the little stalker that lies in all of us.
I have to say that the first 15 minutes were the best fun I had on the Internet since Google put a decent search engine out there. The sheer pleasure of finding meaningless facts about people kept me going... until the experience inevitably lead me down  memory lane as I encountered forgotten photos of myself commented or liked somewhere by somebody who was but a digital ghosts from Christmas past.

Thus, I oscillated between the state of mind of a poet and that of a trashy tabloid journalist for a quarter of an hour, but the effect kind of wears thin after a while...
In the end, you really do have to be a marketeer at heart to get a kick out of knowing that  there are over 100 female individuals in Bogota, Columbia, who both like Oreo cookies AND Origami....
But that only 7 individuals in Lisbon, Portugal like Oreo AND Mickey...
I shudder to think of the poor and alienated soul that will work the analytics on this one, desperately trying to find some sort of sickening and twisted correlation. ( Was Origami boosting the cookies sales? Or was Mickey suppressing Oreo? And how to factor in the Hispanic versus Lusophone aspect of the equation? What did it all mean?)

But, as my excitement wound down, I realized that I might be missing a little historical perspective.
After all, a few tries and the tool did allow me to find who were the "People who are Muslims " and living in my area, enlighten me to the fact that  there are "People who are Jewish and living in Ireland" as well as tell if my friends knew of any "Men who are interested in Men" or "People who like the Republican Party" .
The tool does seem equally adequate for either left or right wing dictatorship as well as any sort of genocide/bashing/hate crime that one may have in mind.

Bottom line: fun tool probably good for business, but - in case you have not done it already - you might want to tune your privacy setting and trim a bit your profiles if you don't want to be totally exposed.

I have just opened an open source department under the Advanced Software Platform Lab and we are hiring. Ibrahim Haddad  - ex Linux Foundation - is heading the team.
We will aim at establishing a team that will focus on working with and contributing to key open source technologies/projects/innovation. This team will be interfacing with the open source community in perfect accordance to its principle. Position will be out soon formally and more details will be posted. In the mean-time -in case you are interested -  contact me, and send me your CV, or contact Ibrahim or send us a mail or contact us through our website (http://www.sisa.samsung.com/careers-research-development-sisa/career-opportunities.html) - just get through to us one way or the other if you want to be part of the excitement!A lot of us will be at the 7th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco from the 15th to 17th of April if you have any question or in case you just want to chat. Hope to see you there!

Looking for a business development manager.
Just go to  http://careers.us.samsung.com. And use the information bellow to look for the position:
- Post title : Business Development Manager
- Company : SISA
- Location : San Jose, California

This is quite an important position to substain/steer our research and development from the business point of view. You need to have imagination and you need to know the silicon valley ecosystem.
Send me your application by mail.
Please forward this blog post or retweet if you know about somebody who might be interested