Dept. of Computing Science
U. of Newcastle

Alex Yakovlev

Professor of Computing System Design

School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering
(in August 2002 moved from Department of Computing Science)
University of Newcastle

Research Interests

Publications

The full list is here

Curriculum Vitae

The full CV (for promotion to Personal Chair in 1999) here

Research topics (very hot!)

For prospective PhD applicants: click here

Jobs and studentships in the Newcastle VLSI Design group

Currently, nothing is available. However, enquiries are always welcome.

Traces of Research Activity

I am Principal Investigator on EPSRC-funded projects:
BESST , COHERENT , HADES, TIMBRE, COMFORT (see also COMFORT home page), MOVIE (see also MOVIE home page) ASTI (visiting fellowships of Prof. Alex Kondratyev and Prof. Luciano Lavagno), and BREACH (visiting fellowship of Dr. Nikolai Starodoubtsev from Russian Academy of Science, to work on Behavioural REfinements for Asynchronous Circuit syntHesis);
two British Council -funded joint projects, a Acciones Integradas (Part 2) project with Prof. Jordi Cortadella's group at Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, and an ARC project with Prof. Monika Heiner's group at Brandenburg Technical University at Cottbus, Germany;
and participate in ESPRIT-funded projects DEVA and ACID-WG

(see also VLSI Design Research Group Projects and VLSI Design research group page )

1998:

I have organised Workshop on Hardware Design and Petri Nets within the 19th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets Lisbon, Portugal, June 1998

I have co-organised a Special Interest Workshop on Exploitation of STG-based Design Technology (announcement and report) at St. Petersburg, Russia, 6-7 July 1998

Last ASTI project meeting (aka ACiD-WG special interest group meeting) with Luciano Lavagno and Alex Kondratyev has been held at Newcastle in the period of 20 Jul-5 Aug.

Our project ASAP (Automated Synthesis of Parallel and Asynchronous Controllers, EPSRC Research Grant GR/J52327) has been graded as follows:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 5 (top)
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)
ASAP publication list

Our long (and long-awaited!) overview paper in the recent Advanced Course on Petri nets :

A.V. Yakovlev and A.M. Koelmans
Petri nets and Digital Hardware Design
Lectures on Petri Nets II: Applications
Advances in Petri Nets, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1492.
Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 154-236.


We would be happy if it proved useful to anyone exploring the exciting area of HW+PN.

1999:

I have co-organised the Second Workshop on Hardware Design and Petri Nets within the 20th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, June 1999

I have co-organised the Third ACiD-WG Workshop , held on 18-19 January, 1999 in Newcastle.

I have served as a co-chair of the Programme Committee of ASYNC'99 to be held in Barcelona in April '99.

I have organised the Seventh Asynchronous UK Forum to be held in Newcastle, 20-21 December 1999

Our ASTI Project (Asynchronous circuit Synthesis and TestIng, EPSRC Research Grant GR/L24038,
visiting fellowships of Prof. Alex Kondratyev and Prof. Luciano Lavagno), has been graded as follows:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 5 (top)
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)

2000:

Our presentation at the ACiD-WG workshiop in Grenoble, January 2000 was about the perspectives of using direct translation techniques in synthesis of asynchronous controllers from Petri net specifications. Here are powerpoint and ps files

I have co-edited a book on Hardware Design and Petri Nets for Kluwer AP, based on the collection of papers presented at the HWPN workshops. The book has been published in March 2000. Hardware Design and Petri Nets (about the book)
Ordering the book from Kluwer AP

Our projects HADES (Hazard-free Arbiter DESign, EPSRC Research Grant GR/K70175)
and TIMBRE (TIMe-predicatBle hardwaRE platforms for real-time systems, EPSRC Research Grant GR/L28098)
have been respectively graded as follows:
HADES:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 5 (top)
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)
TIMBRE:
Scientific or technical merit - alpha 4
Management and use of resources - Excellent (top)

Our first silicon, the result of the HADES and COMFORT (see also COMFORT home page) projects, has been received from EUROPRACTICE on 9 June. The first photos are here

I have co-organised (with Jordi Cortadella and Luciano Lavagno) Advanced Tutorial on Hardware Design and Petri nets , held on 26 June, 2000 in Aarhus, Denmark within the 21st Int. Conf. On Appl. and Theory of Petri Nets (PN'2000)
The workshop materials are available from the PN2000 conference site:
Download: PDF (1.5 MB)
Download Addendum: PDF (724 Kb)

I have co-organised the AINT'2000 Workshop (Two-day workshop on Asynchronous Interfaces: Tools, Techniques, and Implementations) to be held in Delft, The Netherlands, 19-20 July 2000

My tutorial "Specifying Controllers using Petri Nets" at the 9th Async UK Forum was kindly given by Luciano Lavagno. The tutorial examples handout: gzipped postscript.

2001:

My talk "Communicating in Heterogeneously Timed Systems" (abstract) at the ICSA Colloquium in Edinburgh:
Slides in Powerpoint(1MB),
Handouts gzipped postscript(500KB)

I have co-organised (with Maciej Koutny, Albert Koelmans and Jason Steggles) a dual conference in Newcastle on 25-29 June 2001: 22nd Int. Conf. on Appl. and Theory of Petri nets and 2nd Int. Conf. on Appl. of Concurrency to System Design , and acted as a programme co-chair on the latter.

Papers presented at the 11th UK Async. Forum in Cambridge : tarred and gzipped

2002:

Tutorial "Logic Design of Asynchronous Circuits" by J.Cortadella, J. Garside and A. Yakovlev at ASPDAC/VLSI Design 2002 zipped (PPT and PS) files, including 'readme.txt'

Talk at the 2nd EC Framework 5 workshop in Munich (28 Jan 2002): "Behavioural synthesis of asynchronous controllers: a case study with a self-timed communication channel" (Powerpoint)

Monograph Logic Synthesis of Asynchronous Controllers and Interfaces by J. Cortadella, M. Kishinevsky, A. Kondrateyv, L. Lavagno and A. Yakovlev, has appeared from Springer in March 2002, ISBN3-540-43152-7.

Maciej Koutny and I have organised NATURAL COMPUTING DAYS AT NEWCASTLE on March 4-5, 2002.

Some publicity of our group's research (with certain technical inacurracies - bless the media!):
in TechExtreme ,
in Yahoo News ,
in Russian SciTechlibrary (and *almost* the same in Russian - please excuse someone's `wonderful' translation!),
in Suddeutche Zeitung
An article in Times Higher Education Supplement "Clock-free technology developed", THES, 26 April 2002 (p6) ( here )
Spiegel Online
KLIK Magazin
Sweden: British Embassy news (by Paul Shepherd)
Perm' State University (in Russian)
Vnunet.nl Professional
Arkos.it
British Trade (by Paul Shepherd)
Space Daily

My invited lecture "Is the Die Cast for the Token Game" (with contributions from Frank Burns, Alex Bystrov, Delong Shang and Danil Sokolov) was presented at 23rd Int. Conf. on Applications and Theory of Petri nets, Adelaide, Powerpoint slides
The full conference proceedings can be found here

The Petrify group has been selected as a finalist in the prestigeous Descartes Prize 2002 competition: Press Release

At present:

Jordi Cortadella, Grzegorz Rozenberg and I are editing the book "Advances in Concurrency and Hardware Design" to be published by Springer in 2002 (LNCS 2549).

Useful research links and docs

Teaching Activities in 2001/02

TEMPUS/TACIS Activities:

A collaborative TACIS/TEMPUS project with Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University (KRSU) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Administrative Duties in 2001/02


Misc useful links

Mathematics and Theoretical CS:
American Mathematical Monthly
Topics in Mathematics
AMS (American Mathematical Society)
Math - General Resources
Theoretical CS database
SIGACT News Theory Calendar
The Hamiltonian Page
Planar Graphs
Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics
Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles
Conway's "Life" Miscellany
Internet Resources for the College Math Student
Algorithms
Collected Algorithms of the ACM
The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository
Scott Gasch's Algorithm Archive
Geometry in Action: discrete and computational geometry
A Survey of Global Optimization Methods (Gray et al)
The Geometry Center
VLSI
VLSIhoo
IBM Microelectronics
Yield and Reliability in VLSI
Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present
CPU Info Center
MATLAB:
MATLAB Tips and Previews
MATLAB at MathWorks

E-mail

Alex.Yakovlev@newcastle.ac.uk

Telephone numbers

Voice: +44-191-222-8184
Fax: +44-191-222-8232

Mailing address

Department of Computing Science
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
The United Kingdom NE1 7RU

Geographical location

Room 813, Claremont Tower,
The University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne