Munich, days 4 and 5
March 13th, 2008 at 10:52 pm12.03.2008
Yesterday at the conference was somewhat better. It was a special automotive day with a lot of practical, industry related talks I could attend. The current trends in the embedded industry are quite clear, and I can also learn something from it and apply it to my work. I wrote down some notes on things to keep in mind and check up later – when I get back to work I’ll need at least a couple of days to carefully go through stuff and see what can be applicable in the future.
The talks were given by important members of the automotive community. One was by the head of IT in BMW, for example. Another was by the head of research in Pirelli, the Italian tire producer. The Pirelli talk was very cool – about sensors embedded in in tires of the future. One of the trends of the industry – low power, comes into play very strongly here, because sensors inside tires will have to be completely autonomous and find their own power to run and to transmit information wirelessly.
In general, the topic of low power is becoming extremely important in embedded devices, because of the the “dreams” of the industry is devices that can work without external power supplies. Such devices will use “scavengers” based on MEMS that will collect energy from vibrations, temperature and other ever-present sources. The energy collected by such means is naturally very small, hence power consumption of embedded devices must be brought to milliwatts or even less.
Complexity and system-engineering is also of great concern. Embedded systems grow in complexity and size. According to the automotive industry’s data, the amount of SW code inside cars will reach 100 million LOC in the next few years. Current high-end cars have several interconnected CAN networks, and the overall system complexity is very high. To manage it, companies create tools for ESL – Electronic System Level, TLM – Transaction Level Modeling, and other keywords. It will be interesting to see how this goes. Personally I’m not too optimistic. Look at the consumer/PC software – it has reached such complexities some time ago, and still no silver bullet was found. In the end it still boils down to engineers writing and debugging C/C++ code.
Finally, there is a major focus on reliability and fault tolerance. The automotive industry is moving in the direction of safety critical systems (like drive-by-wire), and is repeating the steps of the aerospace industry. Only that in automotive, costs must be much lower, and just triplicating every system is not a viable solution. This topic is of great interest to me professionally, and I’m trying to follow the talks related to it closely. I’ll be also participating in a workshop on reliable systems on Friday.
Generally, being at this conference is a huge information overload. You attend lectures for several hours each day, in the breaks you go to the exhibition and chat with people on these topics, and even with people you meet you talk about work and research. It kinda reminds me of traveling, when you meet people at hostels and a standard “where are you from, where are you heading, where have you traveled, what do you like most about … etc” talk begins. Here it’s similar, you meet people from all around the world which is very nice, but you generally talk about “what is your research / work, which lecture did you attend or plan to attend” and so on.
In the evening there was the conference party, at the world-famous Hofbräuhaus beer-hall. It was established in 1589 and is one of the main attractions of Munich, so well-known that there is a replica of it in Las Vegas. It’s a huge hangar-sized hall, full of long wooden tables where people are supposed to drink a lot of beers and have a good time. I sat at the table with the guys from Ireland whom I met earlier, an Indian guy who studies in Germany, and two guys who study in Denmark – one Pakistanian and one Chinese. The Chinese one works on something related with formal verification and is intimately familiar with the work done in the group I worked in, in IBM Haifa labs. He also said that all the Israeli researchers he knows are very strong, especially in theoretical topics – it was pleasant to hear.
The organization of the event was less than perfect. The food was served in a buffet, and they’ve opened only two locations – for 600 people !! We stood about 40 minutes in a queue to get food – it wasn’t nice. There was lots of beer flowing, though, people drinking mostly in huge 1-liter jugs. At about 10 PM a band started playing songs from the 80s and 90s, but I was already quite tired and headed to the hotel.
13.03.2008
At the conference today I managed to drag through until lunch-time, but felt that I can’t take it any-more. The lectures were quite boring, and I continued feeling the overload of information from the past days. I needed rest, and decided to take the rest of the day off.
As the weather was chilly and cloudy, I headed back to the hotel to pick up my scarf. While at it, I’ve changed the fleece for my trusty Columbia rain-jacket and took gloves. It was a smart decision, as the day turned out to be very winter-ish, cold (around 4 degrees C with a chilly wind) and with light rain. However, armed by my rain-and-cold gear (and a rain cover for my backback) I was well-equipped to handle it.
Today I’ve really given the Munich public transportation system a good exercise. Overall, counting the rides to and from the conference and the connections, I rode 6 times on the U-bahn, twice on the S-bahn and twice on the tram. Together with about 3 hours of walking, I covered quite some distance !
I began with Allianz Arena – Bayern Munich’s new football stadium. It has a very unusual architecture ! I entered the inside, but decided to skip the guided tour since it was more than half an hour away and only in German.
Next I went to visit BMW Welt – BMW’s futuristic event center and show-room. Did you know that the acronym BMW stands for Bavarian Motor Works ? The main BMW factory is also in Munich, right next to the Welt, but unfortunately tours inside must be ordered weeks in advance. Here’s the Welt with the BMW headquarters in the background:
Right next to BMW Welt is the Munich Olympic park, where the 1972 summer Olympics were held. There is also the Olympic Stadium, where Bayern Munich played until 2005, famous for its “curtainy” looks:
Of course, the 1972 Olympics are notorious for the murder of 11 Israeli Athletes by Palestinian terrorists. This monument outside the stadium commemorates this event:
Next, I went to the Nymphenburger castle. To get there, I had to take a U-bahn, a S-bahn, a tram (for the first time) and do quite some walking. I liked the stroll through a Munich suburb though. The castle itself is surrounded by huge parks and lakes:
It’s a shame all the trees are bare of leaves. It must be really beautiful here a bit later in the year.
When I walked out of the castle, I decided to try and reach the hotel by foot. After 45 minutes walking I saw on the map that I’m barely a 1/3 through, so I took the tram, as I was already quite tired.
All in all it was a very nice day, and I did a lot of exploring of Munich. I think that I’ll maybe go to Salzburg on Saturday, as I have already seen all the major attractions in Munich.
Some random observations:
- Lots of people are reading books in the subway and the trains. Curiously, no one speaks on the cellular – because it has no reception in the subway. This is quite different from Israel, where a train is usually as loud as a pub because 80% of the people speak on the cellular. It’s so much nicer when everyone quietly reads a book
- Some simple yet efficient means to improve transportation here keep amazing me. For example, today on the way to Allianz Arena which is located in a suburb to the north of the city, I noticed that near the S-bahn stations there are covered “sheds” to place bicycles in, full with tied bicycles. So simple – people come to the train station in a bicycle, have a covered and safe place to leave it, and can continue to work in the train.
- I noticed that U-bahn is not always below the ground – in the suburbs it comes to the surface. S-bahn, OTOH, comes below ground in the city center. So, there’s no clear cut separation between them. U-bahn stations are always located much deeper, though.
- It’s not surprising that Munich is the city with the strongest economy in Germany. Some of their largest companies have their HQs in Munich, for example the world-level giants Siemens, BMW, Allianz and MAN (trucks and buses manufacturer).
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