[clean-list] Alcimar-Paschoarelli's paper

[Eduardo Costa]

Dr. Alcimar's paper on the use of functional languages on
signal processing and real time control (Functional Languages
in Signal Porcessing Applied to Prosthetic Limb Control) was published in
System Analysis Modelling Simulation, Vol. 42, Number 9,
09/2002, ISBN 0232-9298. By the way, Dr. Alcimar won the ASC- 2002  best
paper award for another paper related to this one (it will be
published soon, and I will let you know when it gets printed).
 The SAMS paper deals with a myoelectric control
system for an  upper-limb prosthesis.  Dr. Alcimar used a
special material called shape memory alloy (SMA) to act as actuator
for the joints. SMA acts as an analogue of a biological muscle.
The signal processing programs that recognizes the features
of the myoelectric signals were written in Clean, C++, Mercury
and Prolog (Ciao and GNU).
The C++ programs were written by Dr. Jamil Salem Barbar.
Nobody in the project is enthusiastic about Clean or functional
programming. Even so, everybody agrees that (at least for signal
processing) Clean:

1- is as fast as C.
2- uses less resources than the other languages, even C.
Dr. Jamil, who  performed the tests, do not know how to
program in Clean, and don't like functional programming.
However, he was amazed to see how stingy the Clean compiler is.
3- The debuging of the C and Matlab versions of the programs
took months. The Clean  prototype (using Zermelo-Frankel)
worked right away and the Clean final version (iterative)
was running after one week.

I recommend that you people  take a look at this interesting paper
for more details.  By the way, although I am in the list of
authors,  my contribuition was very small. In fact, the only
thing I did was to suggest publishing the paper in the Functional
Programming Journal, instead of sending it to a publication
specialized in Modelling or in Bio-engineering. It turned out
that my suggestion was discarded (I do not know the reason),
but my name was kept in the list of authors.

The signal processing algorithm used to retrieve features of
the electro-myographics singal was designed by Dr. Paschoarelli,
a mathematician.

Eduardo Costa

Este e-mail foi analisado pelo RAV AntiVirus no servidor doodle.dr.ufu.br da
Universidade Federal de Uberlāndia - Uberlāndia - MG - Brasil