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Home > Groups > Sensing and Energy Research Group (SERG)
Sensing and Energy Research Group (SERG)

Sensing and energy are emerging cross-cutting concerns in computer systems. The proliferation of embedded and personal devices such as networked sensors and mobile phones gives computer systems increasing capability of gathering data from and adapting to the physical world and personal activities. Energy constraints at different scales can affect battery life and thus user experiences in embedded devices, and can be a limiting factor for the growth of IT infrastructure. Capturing, understanding, and exploiting sensor data and energy characterisitic will continue to revolutionize how technologies can serve people, provide awareness, improve efficiency, and reduce resource consumption.

SERG at MSR conducts fundamental and applied research on impacts and interfaces between computing systems and the physical world. We develope 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, data centers, and green cloud computing.

Projects:

  • Mobile Subjective Sensing

The essence of the project is to sense mobile phone users as subjective individuals, rather than objects 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 continuously sense the mobile users and to extract subjective information such as user presence, preference, and priority.

Our research efforts, code named Munich (Mobile Users in Non-Intrusive Computing Hierarchies) include SensoryPhone: energy-efficient always-on sensing architecture and technologies on mobile devices; CondOS: abstrations and a run-time system for mobile context aware operating systems and applications; Everest: subjective data management across computing hierarchies; BingNow!: A subjective mobile search engine.

Data centers are complex physical systems hosting massive online and cloud services. Some mega-scale data centers can contain hundreds of thousands of servers and consume over a hundred mega-Watts of power. Improving their efficiencies is both an important cost reduction measure for online service companies and a part of the social responsibility of the IT industry as a whole.

The goal of the project is to sense and understand key operating parameters for data centers and to ultimately improve their operation efficiency. Our research efforts and achievements include: MeshID: tracking the physical assets in data centers; Genomotes: wireless sensor nodes for dense temperature and humidity sensing; RACNet: a reliable data aquisition network; Cypress: a compressive data management system for streaming sensor data; Prophet: a data-driven capacity management tool for data centers; CoolShift: a thermo-aware modeling tool for data centers as a cyber-physical system. 

Addressing challenges in reducing enterprise and cloud computing energy consumption, we design and develop tools, analysis methodologies, and control systems to measure, model, and optimize computer systems for energy efficiency.

Research efforts include JouleMeter: a tool that provides visibility into computer, virtual machine (VM), and application level power consumption using software observable performance counters; Cuanta: a methodology and tool for quantifying VM performance interference in consolidated servers, especially due to on-chip resource sharing; VPS: Power budgeting for virtualized infrastructures.  

  • High Performance Embedded Computing
      • Pocket Cloudlets: Mobile phones have two inherent constraints when consuming online information: high latency, as the data needs to travel through the cell network, and limited battery life. These constraints create a much slower experience when accessing the cloud comparing to a PC. We propose to bridge this gap by introducing a new way of architecting cloud services: pocket cloudlets. In this new paradigm, the phone becomes part of the actual cloud. Cloud services are pushed to the mobile device, converting phones to personal and compact versions of the cloud that lives in users' pockets. Both data and cloud services (i.e., search, web, maps etc.) are replicated on the mobile device, to enable instant response times and facilitate personalization. Our efforts have been focused on the design and implementation of pocket cloudlets in the context of search (SONGO) and web browsing (PocketWeb).
      • FlashDB: High performance data base on flash-based embedded storage

 

Research Collaborations:

Past Projects:

   mPlatform | SenseWeb | MSR Sense | SONGS |Tinker

Publications

    2012

      2010

      2009

      2008

      2007

      2006

      2005

      Highlights:

      • Download JouleMeter
      • Visit our previous page: Networked Embedded Computing
      • Awards and Honors:
        • Jie Liu elevated to ACM Distinguished Scientist (2011)
        • Suman Nath elevated to ACM Senior Member (2011)
        • Jie Liu and MSRA collaborators: Best Demo Award, SenSys 2011
        • Suman Nath and collaborators: Best Paper Award, SSTD 2011
        • Bodhi Priyantha, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao and collaborators: Best Paper Award, RTAS 2010
        • Gerald DeJean: Distinguished Young Alumni Award (Michigan State Univ. 2009)
        • Yanif Ahmad and Suman Nath: Best Paper Award, ICDE 2008
        • Suman Nath and collaborators: Best Paper Award, NSDI 2006 
        • Aman Kansal: Edward K Rice Outstanding PhD Award (UCLA, 2006)
        • Bodhi Priyantha: George M. Sprowls Award--for an outstanding PhD thesis in computer science (MIT, 2005)
      • News/Blog coverage:
      • Major conference organization:

      • Meet some of us at:

        • ACM KDD 2011
        • Ubicomp 2011
        • SOSP/SOCC 2011
        • SenSys 2011
      People
      Michel Goraczko
      Michel Goraczko

      Aman Kansal
      Aman Kansal

      Jie Liu
      Jie Liu

      Suman Nath
      Suman Nath

      Bodhi Priyantha
      Bodhi Priyantha

      External Collaborators:

      Interns/Student Consultants:

      2011: Hossein Ahmadi, Xuan Bao, Arka Bhattacharya, Yin Chen, Cristina Dominicini, Yuanhua Lv, Radhika Mittal, Moo-Ryong Ra, Alan Roytman, Negin Salejegheh, Tingxin Yan, Tao Zhang, Ziguo Zhong.

      2010: Shah Amini, Christina Delimitrou, Michaela Goetz, Oliver Kennedy, Pavan Kumar, Hong Lu, Miguel Palomera Perez, Aveek Purohit, Heitor Ramos, Peixiang Zhao