Planet Maemo: category "feed:d573028622e777551a22558b061985bf"

webCL 1.0 is ratified and released!

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 20:17:00 +0000

We have been working close to 2 years on this so it is only natural to be happy. Tasneem - from my lab has been chairing the working group on webCL - I want to say that she did a wonderful job and it was great to work with Khronos Group.

You can find the specification here https://www.khronos.org/webcl/

And here is the official press release from Khronos: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-webcl-1.0-specification.

webCL can help any developer harness the underlying power of GPU's and multi core device directly from the browser. It will allow parallel processing directly the browser and can enable a completely new category of web apps such as the one based on physics engine, video editing, image and photo processing and manipulation, etc...

I also want to remind everybody that we have an implementation of this - go and check it out: https://github.com/SRA-SiliconValley/webkit-webcl.

There will also be a WebCL DevU session at the GDC tomorrow on March 20 at 3:00 pm, in the Moscone Center, in San Francisco. http://www.khronos.org/news/events/khronos-devu-sessions-gdc-2014

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Web gaming event in France

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:11:00 +0000

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 session

Attendance 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/

OpenCL and webCL available as add for Tizen SDK 2.2.1

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 03:47:00 +0000

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

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Advanced Software Platform Lab Presence at LinuxCon North America

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 19:13:00 +0000

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.

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Introducing Jalangi - for JavaScript developers

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 17:16:00 +0000

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.

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Ramping up on Javascipt for development and research

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:07:00 +0000

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.

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Tizen Developer Conference coming up...

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:50:00 +0000

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.

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Open Source positions are posted.

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:24:00 +0000

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

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Graph search: great fun...to be handled carefully

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:56:00 +0000

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.

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Hiring Open Source Talent

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:39:00 +0000

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!

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Looking for a business development manager

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:28:00 +0000

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

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Gram...and the unbearable lightness of being me.

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:41:00 +0000

WebOS has just been re branded as Gram. Long live Gram!
Unfortunately now is also the time for me to announce that I have left webOS. I am now working at Samsung.
Before the web takes this statement and make it again one of those this-is-the-proof-that-webOS-is-dying kind of thingy.
I want to make clear the following statement.
When I left webOS, I left a great team with great people and an organization with a credible business plan, a strategy and the support and means from HP to make it happen.
I also left an organization that was mature and had thought through its DNA and culture. And I left also an engineering team that had been re-organized, re-composed, that was cranking out code, hiring, setting up processes and architecture like never before, with the budget and support to achieve their goals.
It is not up to me to predict the future and say whether they will be successful or not, Believe me when I say that Gram has a very, very good prospect. And my gut feeling is that it is not the last we hear from them.
I also left a great boss - named Martin Risau - which has been the major force behind this rebirth. A great boss, who made and said all the right thing to make it very hard for me to go.
Actually I left so much behind that it was one of the hardest professional decision I have ever had to make.
But in the end, what Samsung offered me, was- from a professional and purely intellectual point of view - simply to good to resist; I had to listen to a much lighter and selfish side of me and break away from a family to join a new one.
I needed to make this clear, as - starting next week - I will be recruiting for my new Samsung team and I did not want any confusion on the subject nor did I want this to be misinterpreted in any way.
I want to thank all the great people I have worked with at webOS.
Martin, Leonid, Steve, Itai, Dragan, Jayshree, Kent, Enda, Gray, Susan, Christine, Keith, Keith, Roger, Ari, etc..and all the other that I could not name.... I will see you around and wish you luck from the bottom of my heart.

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N950 for 1400 dollars...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 21:05:00 +0000

A year ago Nokia announced the death of the meego platform. A few days ago, Nokia released the last PR SW 1.3 for the N9...and for quite a while now, the N950 - a keyboard version of the N9 that was initially for developers only - has been selling on ebay.
Some are on ebay spain (http://www.ebay.es/itm/Nokia-N950-dev-phone-/280896512893?pt=UK_Mobile_Phones&hash=item4166bca37d.).
Now it seems that one of those device went for 1136 euros... so about 1400 dollars!!!
The legend continues....

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webOS Community Edition has been released!

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 21:43:00 +0000

webOS Community Edition has been released (http://blog.openwebosproject.org/post/25941335672/open-webos-june-update-community-edition-released) It is basically a release for everybody to play around and get acquainted with the code until Open webOS 1.0. IT supports the Touchpad, so have fun!
Thanks to the webOS internals team and Tom King.

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Qt

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 19:18:00 +0000

We are hiring senior Qt engineers. You can go to the HP website and search for the job Id 997835. You can also contact me directly or through linked in.

We have also added other positions since last time I blogged. Just make a search with the keyword: webOS. Here is the link to the HP job search: https://hp.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobsearch.ftl;jsessionid=0FFACFB8ECAAC014E9135AD1A63A55E9.JB_17489_17496?lang=en

Thanks

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05/28/12

Mon, 28 May 2012 10:15:00 +0000

webOS reloaded.

It has been a tough year but webOS is on the rise again. I am in charge of development for the whole webOS software stack as well as the community and developer relations that are behind Open webOS.
With the help of our wonderful team, we are already in the process of defining a great roadmap. We need people...and we are already recruiting. Bellow you will find a few interesting positions related to my organization.
Director, Systems Software Engineering-991801

webOS- Software Infrastructure Tools / Release Engineer-976550

webOS- Software Engineer QA-970251

webOS - Sr. Software Engineer-991551

webOS - Sr. Software Engineer-991832

Just go to HP site (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/jobsathp/index.html) and enter the details of the job title/Id in the search bar. A more general search with the keyword webOS should yield you other positions in other domains such as HI, Cloud, Product Management which are handled by

Keep coming. There will be more.

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Enyo now, Open webOS 1.0 in September

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:32:00 +0000

First steps towards open webOS, read on
http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/25/hp-webos-to-be-fully-open-sourced-by-september-enyo-2-0-framew/

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Legend

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:06:00 +0000

2 weesk ago, Nokia released what is probably its greatest device until now. The N9.

I have worked 2 years on almost every aspects of the N9 and 10 years on the Maemo/Meego platform. The N9 is actually the first true design statement from Nokia and it is carrying a technology that was unique in the mobile platform world... Many things are right in this device... Yet, six month ago, Nokia ramped down meego and discontinued any effort to take this platform further.

This appears to be a paradox, but it is not. Strategy is the voice of realpolitik. Somebody adds the numbers, looks at the bottom line, makes a decision.... and sometimes makes a sacrifice, and takes a chance...Future will tell.

I will found comfort in predicting that the N9 will have the destiny of a legend. Intense, grandiose and short lived like a firework...."Too weird to live , too rare to die" like a rock'n roll star.

Mark my words, when Hendrix wants to connect with Cobain in heaven, he goes for his guitare, halts, reaches for his pocket...and pulls out his N9.

I thank all of my colleagues and friends in Nokia and Meego for those wonderful 10 years. Hat's off to you, gentlemen.

I know we will always be in touch.

As for me, I have left Nokia since the summer, and I have started heading Application and Platform development for webOS for HP.

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Real People

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:53:00 +0000

N900 has been on the market for more then a month now…Time flies…
The buzz is continuing and sales seem to have started very, very, very well…
I am obviously happy about all this…But actually something else is making my day.

For months and months, we have been designing a ground-breaking product for Nokia in a completely closed environment.
Off course, designers have designed, architects have "architected", developers have developed, and managers have managed. We have done feasibility studies, we have done usability studies, we know more or less where we succeeded, and we know more or less where we still need to improve. And we have been endlessly testing the device and doing endless amount of modifications with customer satisfaction in mind.

But all this is no substitute for reality that is to say: real people using the device in their real environment

The fact remains: when you are designing such a product, you need to have an intuition for what the customer wants and this intuition drives every single one of your actions for months.
There are tools, methods and process that you can use to measure how good you are doing along the way, but in the end it is all about the intuition and the strength of the confidence that you put behind it to drive the work…and eventually it all boils down to the time when the device gets in the hands of the customer.
Are they going to like the browser? The multiple home-screen? What about the conversation views? Are they going to notice this and that feature? All this gets resolved magically within couple of weeks.

I was not the only one starving for this. Last week-end, some of our guys from our application testing team went to do a couple of days of internship at our flagship store. They actually sold our device during a whole day and got confronted to customers themselves. The feedback we got from the guys was quite outstanding; some said the experience was simply tremendous.
With the huge coverage the N900 has been getting, no need to say that we have on our hand a unique opportunity to grow our knowledge and experience on the matter. We need to leverage this.

I myself will probably see you around at the Nokia Flagship store somewhere in the winter.

Wishing you a happy new year.21 0

Maemo positions opened in Finland, US and India

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:02:00 +0000

There are a lot of positions opened now in Maemo. Just click here, and this should take you to a search engine which has all our opened positions. Uuse the obvious "maemo" keyword, and you will find everything from engineering to marketing positions.

In the Application team, we are looking for architects, project managers, programmers, etc... covering a lot of different areas: browsing, location, real time communication, productivity, testing, program management, services, etc...and there are openings in Finland, US (Mountain View) and Bangalore.
I -in particular - am looking for somebody to drive our development in Bangalore - if you feel up to it , don't hesitate to contact me.18 0