Visiting the NI Berkeley Office

I’ve spent a couple of days this week at the NI Berkeley office. This is a relatively new office and it has a

View from NI Berkely Office

great view of the bay. The office isn’t too far of a walk from the Berkeley campus. This is my first visit to the area and the campus was very green, hilly and picturesque. During the visit I got a chance to visit the NI Embedded Systems Lab which was opened in May 2007.

The visit inlcuded getting an overview of Chess (Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems) from Dr. Edward Lee who’s in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science deparement. Dr. Lee has some papers in the areas of Models of Computation which is something you’ve probably seen, even if the term may not be familiar from NI. At it’s simplest level it’s providing the appropriate representations for the problem at hand. For example, dataflow in LabVIEW “G” VIs, Statecharts and Simulation diagrams were introduced to try and address different application and domain needs. The main thing I found useful in the discussion with Dr. Lee and also with the engineers at the NI office was the formal methods that can be applied to the concepts we’ve worked on in the past and continue to examine.

Your Hybrid Isn't Green Enough

On the way back from the office we came across this pretty interesting sign. It brought home to me that I might have though Austin was a green city but Berkeley sure has an upper hand when a hybrid gets called out as not being “green enough” On the trip I also got to catch up with Jim Kring from JKI. It was a good discussion that covered a number of things including integration into LabVIEW for tools providers (which you’ll hopefully see better documentation and information on later this year), release times and how to better share product roadmaps with partners.