Networked Embedded Computing Group

The Networked Embedded Computing Group has become the

Sensing and Energy Reserch Group (SERG)

The proliferation of embedded and personal devices such as networked sensors and mobile phones gives us increasing capability of gathering data from the physical worlds and our personal activities. Capturing, understanding, and exploiting such information will continue to revolutionize how technologies can serve people, provide awareness, improve efficiency, and reduce resource consumption.

The Networked Embedded Computing Group at Microsoft Research is developing new architectures, hardware and software platforms, system and network organization principles, energy and data management techniques, signal and information processing algorithms, and novel applications to advance the state of art in sensing and energy-efficient systems. The application domains of our research include wireless sensor network, asset management, mobile computing, personalized on-line services, green data centers, and elastic cloud computing.

Projects

Subjective Sensing: The essence of the project is to sense a person as a subjective individual, rather than an objective entity in motion. Leveraging sensors on mobile devices and in the environment, ubiquitous network connectivity, and increasingly powerful computing cloud, we are developing a framework to extract subjective information such as user preference, intent, and priority. We investigate sensing and information processing, resource management, privacy control, programming interface, and on-line services to enable the next generation personalized computing experience.
Little Rock: A novel mobile phone architecture to support low power continuous sensing and context extraction.
SONGO (Search ON the GO): a web search caching and pre-fetching system for mobile devices that allows most of the submitted queries to be served locally without having to use the 3G link. Combining personalized information collected by the mobile devices, SONGO also enables delivering personalized search and advertisement.
DataCAM: The DataCAM project explores problems related to collection, archival, and mining of massive time series data such as resource utilization traces from a data center, search and browser logs, etc.
JouleMeter: A software based mechanism to measure the energy usage of virtual machines (VMs), servers, desktops, laptops, and even individual applications running on a computer. In Green 99, a collaborative project between the Networked Embedded Computing group and the Networking Research Group, we use JouleMeter to measure the benefit of using a sleep server in enterprise computing environment, as well as to provide feedback to users on their PC energy consumption.
Data Center Genome: A joint project between Microsoft Research (MSR) and Microsoft Global Foundation Services (GFS). The goal of the project is to use data-driven and feedback control approaches to monitor, analyze, and improve data center operation efficiencies, to maximize data center capacity utilization, and to minimize their environmental impacts.
SenseWeb: A geo-based web interface for publishing and browsing live sensor data.

Past Projects:

MSR Sense: MSR Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit
SONGS: Service-Oriented Programming of Networks of Sensors
Tinker: A Tool for Designing Data-Centric Sensor Networks

Selected Publications

2011

Klaus Berberich, Arnd Christian König, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, and Peixiang Zhao, Improving Local Search Ranking through External Logs, in 34th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2011) , ACM, July 2011
Harold Lim, Aman Kansal, and Jie Liu, Power Budgeting for Virtualized Data Centers, in 2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '11), USENIX, 15 June 2011
Weiwei Xiong and Aman Kansal, Energy Efficient Data Intensive Distributed Computing, in IEEE Data Engineering (Special Issue on Energy Aware Big Data Processing), IEEE Computer Society, 31 March 2011
Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Dimitrios Lymberpoulos, Karin Strauss, Jie Liu, and Doug Burger, Pocket Cloudlets, in ASPLOS 2011 (International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ACM, March 2011

2010

Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha, Jie Liu, and Andreas Terzis, Surviving Wi-Fi Interference in Low Power ZigBee Networks, in Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2010), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2 November 2010
Hossein Ahmadi, Nam Pham, Raghu Ganti, Tarek Abdelzaher, Suman Nath, and Jiawei Han, Privacy-aware Regression Modelling of Participatory Sensing Data, in SenSys'10: The ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2010
Jie Liu, Automatic Server to Circuit Mapping with The Red Pills, in 2010 Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems (HotPower '10), USENIX, 3 October 2010
Christos Kozyrakis, Aman Kansal, Sriram Sankar, and Kushagra Vaid, Server Engineering Insights for Large-Scale Online Services, in IEEE Micro, IEEE, July 2010
Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Aman Kansal, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Suman Nath, and Bodhi Priyantha, Subjective Sensing: Mission Statement and A Research Agenda, no. MSR-TR-2010-108, July 2010
Joshua Reich, Michel Goraczko, Aman Kansal, and Jitu Padhye, Sleepless In Seattle No Longer, in USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, 22 June 2010
Kaisen Lin, Aman Kansal, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, and Feng Zhao, Energy-Accuracy Trade-off for Continuous Mobile Device Location, in ACM Mobisys, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 15 June 2010
Aman Kansal, Feng Zhao, Jie Liu, Nupur Kothari, and Arka Bhattacharya, Virtual Machine Power Metering and Provisioning , in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 10 June 2010
Arsalan Tavakoli, Aman Kansal, and Suman Nath, On-line Sensing Task Optimization for Shared Sensors, in IPSN 2010, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 12 April 2010
Charles Loboz, Slawek Smyl, and Suman Nath, DataGarage: Warehousing Massive Performance Data on Commodity Servers, no. MSR-TR-2010-22, March 2010
Bodhi Priyantha, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, and Jie Liu, LittleRock: Enabing Energy Efficient Continuous Sensing on Moble Phones, no. MSR-TR-2010-14, 18 February 2010
Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Jie Liu, and Doug Burger, Improving Mobile Search Experience with SONGO, no. MSR-TR-2010-15, 18 February 2010
Suman Nath, SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing, in US-Korea Conference on Science, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (UKC), 2010
Charles Loboz, Slawek Smyl, and Suman Nath, DataGarage: Warehousing Massive Performance Data on Commodity Servers, in VLDB'10: The 36th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Very Large Data Bases Endowment Inc., 2010
Nicholas Lane, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Feng Zhao, and Andrew Campbell, Hapori: Context-based Local Search for Mobile Phones Using Community Behavioral Modeling and Similarity, in 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2010), ACM, 2010
Ashok Anand, Chitra Muthukrishnan, Steven Kappes, Aditya Akella, and Suman Nath, Cheap and Large CAMs for High-performance Data-intensive Networked Systems , in NSDI'10: 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, USENIX, 2010
Suman Nath and Phillip B. Gibbons, Online Maintenance of Very Large Random Samples on Flash Storage, in VLDB Journal, vol. 19, issue 1, Very Large Data Bases Endowment Inc., 2010
Nam Pham Duc, Raghu Kiran Ganti, Md. Yusuf S Uddin, Suman Nath, and Tarek Abdelzaher, Privacy-Preserving Reconstruction of Multidimensional Data Maps in Vehicular Participatory Sensing, in EWSN '2010: 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, Springer Verlag, 2010
Vibhor Rastogi and Suman Nath, Differentially Private Aggregation of Distributed Time-Series with Transformation and Encryption, in SIGMOD '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2010
Nam Pham, Tarek Abdelzaher, and Suman Nath, On Bounding Data Stream Privacy in Distributed Cyber-physical Systems, in SUTC'2010: IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing , IEEE, 2010

2009

Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Jie Liu, Liqian Luo, Andreas Terzis, and Feng Zhao, RACNet: A High-Fidelity Data Center Sensing Network, in Proceedings of The 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2009

For the full list of publications please look here.

Group Members