Why applications are still draining our batteries, and how we can help

Aaron Schulman, Stanford University

12:00pm Tuesday, 01 March 2016, ITE325b

Application developers lack tools to profile and compare the energy consumption of different software designs. This energy-optimization task is challenging because of unpredictable interactions between the application and increasingly complex power management logic. Yet, having accurate power information would allow application developers to both avoid inefficient designs and discover opportunities for new optimizations.

In this talk, I will show that it is possible to accurately measure system-level power and attribute it to application activities. I will present BattOr, a portable, easy-to-use power monitor that provides developers with a profile of the energy consumption of their designs—without modifications to hardware or software. I will show how Google developers are using BattOr to improve Chrome’s energy efficiency. I will also show how fine-grained understanding of cellular power at different signal strengths enables novel energy optimizations. Finally, I will describe my future plans to attribute system-level power to individual hardware components and to investigate opportunities presented by instrumenting every server in a data center with fine-grained power monitoring.

Aaron Schulman is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford working with Sachin Katti; he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, where he was advised by Neil Spring. His research interests are in low-power embedded systems, wireless communication, and network measurement. Aaron’s research on the BattOr power monitor has been funded by Google, is being commercialized by his startup Mellow Research, and is becoming Google’s de facto standard tool for measuring the energy consumption of the Chrome web browser. For his dissertation, Aaron provided the first observations of fundamental factors that limit the reliability of the Internet’s critical last-mile infrastructure. His dissertation was selected to receive the the 2013 ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

TechRepublic identified CSEE professor Marie desJardins as one of “10 artificial intelligence researchers to follow on Twitter”. Check out her feed at @mariedj17.

“Want to know what’s happening at the epicenter of artificial intelligence? Follow these 10 AI researchers who make the most of their 140 characters on Twitter.”

The Maryland Cyber Challenge, or MDC3, is held in Baltimore each year. The competition, organized by the CyberNEXS division of Leidos, provides a hands-on cybersecurity competition for participants through, among other things, a “king of the hill” style challenge. The event tests not only a team’s ability to break into a target machine, but also its ability to secure that machine from attacks by other competitors. In addition, competitors are given a forensics image of a computer, and tasked with finding hidden flags within the image.

In 2015, about 25 college and university teams qualified for the semi-finals, and eight of those teams made it to the finals.  That eight includes two teams from UMBC: Cyberdawgs 1 and Cyberdawgs 2.  The final round of competition began on October 28, but technical difficulties prevented the contest from finishing.

The contest resumed at noon on Saturday, February 20, 2016.  The Cyberdawgs Team 1,  Tyler Campbell, Josh Domangue, Chris Gardner, Anh Ho, Jacob Rust, and Julio Valcarcel took first place with 18,979 points, outscoring the winning team in the professional division by 5690 points. (No other results or point totals were released.)

The Cyber Defense Team’s meetings are open to all students that have a desire to learn hands-on cybersecurity skills, and no prior cyber experience is needed. The club meets during the Spring 2016 semester on Wednesdays at 7:10PM in ITE 231.  To request access to their mailing list, send an email to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. If you have any questions about the club feel free to email Julio Valcarcel (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Anh Ho (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ). The Cyber Defense Team’s faculty advisers are Dr. Charles Nicholas (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) and Dr. Rick Forno (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

Making Medicine Mobile

UMBC researcher Govind Rao wants to bring the bounty of the information age to a drugstore near you.

By Joab Jackson ’90

“You’re watching history being made.”

I am in the basement of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST), speaking with its director, Govind Rao. The “history” that Rao speaks of is a large metallic suitcase, filled with snaking tubes and strange components, being attended to by a swarm of graduate students.

The suitcase is an early prototype of a device that might, one day, be able to produce many medicines the world needs. What’s happening in this basement might radically change a $300 billion health care industry.

Rao is leading 30 people to build the device, as part of a project called BioMOD, short for “biologically-derived medicines on demand.” The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded CAST with a $15.7 million grant over four years to make the device happen.

The heart of the unit is a “bioreactor,” which combines a dried extract of cellular machinery with specific DNA to create the medicine that is needed. The unit is also filled with other equipment to warm the resulting combination to the required temperature, as well as purify the mixture into medicine that can be placed in syringes or vials.

“The goal is to replace an acre-sized plant costing a billion dollars and taking three months to ship out medicine,” says Rao, “with a suitcase sized device” that can produce medicines where they are needed – be it a disaster zone, or a battlefield, or even a far-flung community.