Events - Seminars

Who Should Attend

• Science & Mathematics
• All areas of Engineering
• Economics
• Finance
• Medicine
• MATLAB and Simulink knowledge is not required

Seminar Highlights

Morning Session Abstracts

1) Programming Techniques in MATLAB

This session will illustrate the usage, and explain the benefits of many of the different function types available in MATLAB 7. You will learn how using the right function type can lead to more robust and maintainable code. Demonstrations will show how to apply these techniques to solve optimization problems and make it easier to program GUIs in MATLAB. This session will also provide you with an understanding of how different MATLAB data types are stored in memory.

2) Modeling dynamic systems: An introduction to Simulink

This session gives an introduction to Simulink® as a platform for multidomain simulation and Model-Based Design for dynamic and embedded systems. Unlike text based programming languages such as C and C++, Simulink offers the ability to model and simulate complex dynamic systems using a graphical block diagram. At the heart of Simulink’s graphical programming syntax, is a customizable set of block libraries containing the fundamental building blocks of any dynamic system and a simulation environment that provides both fixed step and adaptive step ODE solvers.

Through product demonstrations, attendees will see a high-level overview of Simulink's major capabilities and how it can be used for design, simulation, implementation, and test, of today's complex dynamic systems. Demonstration models from the control, signal processing, communications, and video processing domains will be shown.

Afternoon Parallel Sessions

Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming in MATLAB

R2008a included a major update to object-oriented programming in MATLAB, enabling easier development and maintenance of large applications and data structures. Using engineering examples, this master class will demonstrate how to define classes and work with objects, highlighting the benefits of this programming approach over traditional procedural techniques. Features covered include class definitions, properties, property attributes, methods, method attributes, and inheritance. No knowledge of object-oriented programming is required.

Parallel Computing with MATLAB

Discover how you can solve large scientific and engineering problems using multiple processors, all from within the MATLAB environment, and without making significant changes to your existing code. This session will provide you with a brief overview of various features in the Parallel Computing Toolbox and show how you can interactively prototype and develop distributed and parallel applications; touching upon ‘parallel’ data structures such as distributed arrays, and programming constructs such as parallel for-loops and message passing functions. The demonstrations will show you practical examples of how to address various classes of problems using the toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server. In conclusion to this session, there will be a brief discussion on how these tools can be integrated in your development environments, covering hardware, software and licensing requirements.

How NOT to break a steel shaft - A tutorial in Control System Design and Implementation using Simulink.

Observe a demonstration of the latest tools for control system design from both the MATLAB and Simulink product families. As a design case study, a motion control problem common in industrial automation applications will be presented – ie: achieving high precision position control of 2 rotational inertias connected by a flexible steel shaft. During this tutorial, it will be shown how to:

• Model the mechanical system within Simulink
• Use real measured plant data(timeseries) to tune the Simulink model
• Design a control law consisting of lead and notch filter components.

After completing the system design, the control law will be deployed onto an actual embedded controller. The effectiveness of the controller will then be observed on a hardware test bench consisting of a DC Servo motor driving a mechanical plant.

Simulink for Signal Processing

As a continuation to the earlier "An Introduction to Simulink" session, we will introduce you to Simulink for signal processing applications in the context of the model based design workflow. By use of example Simulink models, we will show how Simulink can address the challenges faced by those developing complex signal processing systems like analog effects and fixed point scaling. We will introduce you to the signal processing block libraries and take you through the process of building a simple video processing Simulink model. This model will then be taken all the way through to an embedded implementation on a fixed point Texas Instruments DSP.