Sujit Dey - US grants

This research develops advanced methodologies and tools to enable the design of low-energy embedded system-on-nanochips for future wireless appliances. A system-level power analysis technique is developed which considers the effects of wireless protocols, architectural choices, and nanometer technologies on the energy consumption of the hardware, software, and RF components of a wireless embedded nanochip. Since adaptive on-chip communication is fundamental to such heterogeneous component-based nanochips, analysis and optimization techniques are developed for low-energy on-chip communication architectures and protocols. Static and adaptive analysis and management techniques are developed to extend the battery life of the mobile systems. The techniques are being applied to the design of an adaptive single-chip radio that is being developed to enable wireless multimedia communications.

CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Adaptive Applications and Architectures for Variation-Tolerant Systems

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

The scaling of integrated circuits (ICs) into the nanometer regime has thrown up new challenges for designers, foremost among which are variations in the characteristics of IC components. Variations threaten to diminish the fundamental benefits of technology scaling, such as improvements in cost-per-transistor, performance and power consumption. Variation-aware design techniques that have been proposed thus far are being stretched to their limits, and cannot contain the incessant increase in variations. Therefore, it is important to develop new design approaches for systems that are inherently resilient to variations in the underlying components.

This project develops a framework based on adaptive applications and architectures for the design of variation-tolerant application-specific systems. It advances the state-of-the-art by (i) adopting a cross-layer approach at the system architecture and application layers, (ii) leveraging the inherent ?elasticity? of a wide class of applications to adapt to variations in the underlying hardware while still producing acceptable performance and maintaining end-user experience, and (iii) exploring a hybrid (design-time and post-fabrication) design methodology, enabling more accurate and effective system adaptation in response to variations. The developed technologies will significantly extend our ability to avail of the benefits of technology scaling in the face of increasing variations.

The efforts towards broader impact include working with the semiconductor industry to validate and transfer the developed technologies, new educational material incorporated in courses on SoC design and embedded systems, and undergraduate design projects.

This project explores the design of green cellular network architectures and algorithms to reduce energy consumption. A major consumer of energy in cellular networks is the operation of the base stations. Most base stations are deployed and operated continuously based on peak traffic estimates. Intuitively, it saves energy to judiciously "scale back" un-utilized and under-utilized base stations during off-peak times. The remaining base stations must adapt accordingly so that the required coverage is maintained.

The PIs propose a dynamically adaptive cellular network where the cell size and capacity of the base stations are dynamically reconfigured based on the current user locations and Quality of Service (QoS) demands of the applications. Modeling of the network power consumption based on the network topography, followed by optimization of the topography is the key to this problem. The project will involve student participation at all stages through suitably designed projects. The results of the research will be disseminated through professional journals and conference proceedings and also through industry forums and workshops. Furthermore, the project addresses one of the most pressing issues of today, namely, reducing the carbon footprint of the cellular network. Radical new designs for the network have the potential to spur economic development, create jobs and forge stronger communities.

The prominence of 3D video technology has skyrocketed. The 2009 movie Avatar in 3D became the highest grossing movie of all time. Such a movie requires left and right views of a scene. Many video games which provide a 3D experience require multiple views of a scene. Such data is costly to store and to transmit.

This research studies how to efficiently compress multiple-view video data, how to allow the scene to be viewed from any angle at different levels of precision, and how to reliably transmit the data over mobile wireless channels. This research has important applications in science education, traffic monitoring, and surveillance and security.
This research studies efficient encoding, rendering, and transmission of multi-view video, aiming for robust performance at arbitrary speeds of mobile units. The research is applicable both to videos of the real world taken with multiple cameras, and to rendered videos. The investigators study left/right view coding such as in the H.264 MVC standard, and view+depth coding. The latter approach is enhanced by encoding the error signal between the original view and its decoder-synthesized version. To optimally design the system, the techniques use cross-layer optimization, in which physical-layer channel-state information and application-layer distortion-rate or slice-priority information are exploited. Whenever multiple views are rendered from an underlying 3D virtual world, the application's bit requirements can be hugely altered by rendering parameters which affect the content and level of detail of the scene. The investigators study user-experience models to quantify the relationship between rendering parameters and user satisfaction, and develop a channel-aware adaptive encoding and rendering algorithm to account for fluctuations caused by transmission over a mobile channel.

This proposal addresses NSF?s call for universities to nurture students and/or faculty who are engaged in projects having the potential to be transitioned into the marketplace. I-Corps Sites provide infrastructure, advice, resources, networking opportunities, training and modest funding to enable groups to transition their ideas, devices, processes or other intellectual activities into the marketplace or into becoming I-Corps Team applicants.

With this project, the von Liebig Center at UC San Diego (vLC) will become an NSF I-Corps Site to further catalyze the commercialization of university discoveries by extending its services to an untapped population of graduate students, researchers and faculty early-stage discoveries with the expectations that vLC will:

- Build a larger and more robust pipeline of viable student team projects that can be translated into the marketplace from earlier stages of research discoveries.
- Increase awareness and participation in technology commercialization among the broader UCSD research and student community, in particular among females and underrepresented minorities.
- Provide real world experiential learning to the student teams participating in the process while facilitating access to the region?s innovation ecosystem and entrepreneurial support network.
- Expand the suite of offerings that the von Liebig Center can provide to students and faculty for its services to the earlier stages of technology translation.
- Collaborate on ?best-practices? by becoming a member of an I-Corps Site network that shares insights with a wide community of similar centers in the Nation.

These goals will be accomplished through entrepreneurship curricula, identification, selection, and intervention activities, mentoring, and assignment of resources for early stage development - all of which contribute to the academic research translation process through the creation of an integrated, experiential, educational program that focuses on the training of academic innovators while they are still engaged in the early stages of the discovery process.

The vLC has solid processes in place for recruiting, vetting, and supporting teams through their I-Corps Site. They have many noteworthy examples of startups they have supported through their existing center and strong connections with the community, business and industry, and the state of California.

Broader Impact:

The vLC I-Corps SIte will strengthen and broaden the pipeline of innovations from the university while promoting entrepreneurial thinking and activities to thrive in the academic environment.

By encouraging student and faculty/researcher participation actively translating research to early stage development, new products or services will be launched resulting in the creation of high value jobs and economic growth in the region.

Entrepreneurial students from underrepresented groups will have a support network inside the university that will give them the confidence needed to thrive and participate in the process.

Outcomes will be widely disseminated by becoming a member of the NSF I-Corps Site network, thus catalyzing innovation in technology discoveries. The most important impact of this proposed approach is building entrepreneurial principles, early-stage commercialization pipelines, and early-stage incubation schemas. These practices, when proven successful in this approach, can be integrated or replicated to other universities around the country.

Physical therapy is often hampered by lack of access to therapists, and lack of adherence to home therapy regimens. This research develops a physical therapy assistance system for home use, with emphasis on stroke rehabilitation. As a person exercises, inexpensive cameras observe color and depth, and unobtrusive tattoo sensors monitor detailed muscle activity. The 3D movement trajectory is derived and compared against the exercise done with an expert therapist. The patient watches a screen avatar where arrows and color coding guide the patient to move correctly. In addition to advancing fields such as movement tracking, skin sensors, and assistive systems, the project has the potential for broad impact by attracting women and under-represented minorities to engineering through health-related engineering coursework and projects, and because home physical therapy assistance can especially help rural and under-served populations.

This project uses bio-electronics, computer vision, computer gaming, high-dimensional machine learning, and human factors to develop a home physical therapy assistance system. During home exercises, patient kinematics and physiology are monitored with a Kinect color/depth camera and wireless epidermal electronics transferable to the skin with a temporary tattoo. The project involves optimization of electrode design and wireless signaling for epidermal electronics to monitor spatiotemporal aspects of muscle recruitment, hand and body pose estimation and tracking algorithms that are robust to rapid motion and occlusions, and development of machine learning and avatar rendering algorithms for multi-modal sensor fusion and expert-trained optimal control guidance logic, for both cloud and local usage. The system aims to provide real-time feedback to make home sessions as effective as office visits with an expert therapist, reducing the time and money required for full recovery.

The massive increases in wireless devices and data are expected to lead to significant increases in energy consumption and carbon emissions of future wireless networks. The problem will be exacerbated by a growing number of off-grid base stations powered by diesel. This project addresses the sustainability of future wireless networks by significantly reducing the use of electricity and diesel in running wireless base stations, and thereby carbon emissions. While various techniques have been proposed to reduce power consumption of wireless networks, this project will address the challenging problem of efficient and cost-effective use of intermittent renewable power sources like solar and wind power to minimize grid/diesel power consumption while ensuring no adverse impact on user experience. Additionally, the project will demonstrate the feasibility of solar-powered small cells, significantly enhancing wireless connectivity in rural or remote areas, and enable unplanned and rapid deployments in urban areas. The resulting software and testbed will facilitate future research in renewable energy for wireless networks, and a new course on sustainable communications. The PI will work closely with University of California-San Diego Center for Wireless Communications industry members to validate the techniques developed, and facilitate adoption in their products which will lead to adoption of solar and wind energy sources to power future generations of wireless networks.

The project will introduce the concept of using data storage in user devices to transfer surplus renewable power to surplus data stored, to be utilized during periods of deficit renewable power to reduce electricity/diesel, with no need for energy storage. It will be enabled by a novel dynamic base station resource allocation technique which can indirectly impact data rate. This, in turn, will affect the data stored at user devices and also the base station power consumed, depending on surplus and deficit periods, without affecting user experience. A second technique will be developed for use of an additional low capacity energy storage at the base station to further enhance utilization of the temporally varying renewable power. The technique will simultaneously decide to use project will also develop new dynamic user association and transmit power adaptation techniques making use of spatial variations in renewable power between neighboring base stations to minimize total grid electricity/diesel consumed for heterogeneous networks, including showing feasibility of solar-only powered small cells. A simulation framework and testbed will be developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approaches.

This project, from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) creates an extension and expansion of their current I-Corps Site. Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Sites are NSF-funded entities established at universities whose purpose is to nurture and support multiple, local teams to transition their technology concepts into the marketplace. Sites provide infrastructure, advice, resources, networking opportunities, training and modest funding to enable groups to transition their work into the marketplace or into becoming I-Corps Team applicants. I-Corps Sites also strengthen innovation locally and regionally and contribute to the National Innovation Network of mentors, researchers, entrepreneurs and investors.

This Site is the outcome of a Type II proposal from UCSD. There are two types of I-Corps Site proposals: Type I - Type I proposals are submitted by institutions that have not had prior funding as an I-Corps Site; Type II - Type II proposals are submitted by institutions that have had prior funding as an I-Corps Site. The UCSD Type II project proposed continuation and expansion of USCD's existing I-Corps Site, expanding target teams from 30 to 50 annually, integrating collaboration with the existing StartupXX program to nurture female entrepreneurs, adding leadership and team dynamics workshops in collaboration with an existing center on campus, and extending mentoring for I-Corps teams by six months. The Site also builds on a solid track record of success from first round I-Corps Site funding. The extensions to the existing Site are well-conceived, with clearly defined goals, and push the envelope of programming with the requested new funding. Their Site effectively leverages and integrates complementary existing programs, across disciplines, in a strong campus and regional ecosystem.

This proposal aims to develop an open-source platform called M3 to facilitate research in 5G vehicular networking and automotive sensing. M3 enables experimental research on millimeter-wave (mmWave) technologies--the cornerstone for 5G wireless communication and automotive radar sensing. mmWave radio/radar electronically steerable directional beams, generated by large antenna arrays, as communication/sensing medium. Programmability is critical for mmWave experimental research, especially in real-time vehicular networking/sensing. Yet, to date, programmable mmWave devices are either too costly, or lack a reasonably-sized antenna array which is critical for real-time beam-steering operations. M3 will fill this gap with a low-cost software radio/radar featuring a large antenna array. By designing a novel radio/radar architecture, M3 brings the per-node cost down by an order of magnitude, and increases the phased-array size by an order of magnitude, compared with the state-of-the-art. The research team will deploy an open-access experimental testbed on the UCSD campus comprised of the M3 radios/radars. The researchers will also bring M3 to the broader research community, through online Q&A forum, hands-on workshops/tutorials, remote access, and hardware loans/replication services.

This proposal aims to develop a programmable open-source massive Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output (MIMO) millimeter-wave (mmWave) platform called M3 to facilitate experimental research in 5G vehicular networking and automotive sensing. The project comprises three major research thrusts: (i) Develop software/firmware to enable a partially programmable 802.11ad mmWave radio with 288-element phased-array, allowing users to reconfigure the codebook entries and beam patterns, and access real-time per-beam channel state information (CSI). (ii) Develop a mmWave massive MIMO software-radio, comprising 4 radio frequency (RF) chains and 144 antenna elements in total. The software radio will integrate the OpenAirInterface 5G physical layer and core network stack. (iii) Develop a programmable MIMO mmWave phased-array radar, with 4 RF chains and 144 antenna elements, used for exploring high-resolution automotive sensing. M3's cost is an order of magnitude lower compared with the state-of-the-art mmWave software-radio, but its phased-array is an order of magnitude higher. The surprisingly low cost is attributed to a novel radio architecture design, which repurposes a commodity phased-array antenna as a programmable phased-array. This project will bring M3 to the broader research community through hands-on workshops/tutorials, and provide user services including hardware loans, replication, and restricted remote access to a testbed comprised of M3 radios.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This award is a planning grant for the Spectrum Innovation Initiative: National Center for Wireless Spectrum Research (SII-Center). The focus of a spectrum research SII-Center goes beyond 5G, IoT, and other existing or forthcoming systems and technologies to chart out a trajectory to ensure United States leadership in future wireless technologies, systems, and applications in science and engineering through the efficient use and sharing of the radio spectrum. The need for wireless systems is exponentially growing, and future implications need to be explored. Emerging issues, opportunities and challenges for use of highly valuable spectrum and the definition of important and potential breakthrough research agendas and new technologies need to be defined to meet new challenges and achieve a safe, secure, and reliable mobile networked world.

Led by the University of California, San Diego, the assembled team includes team members from the University of Oklahoma, Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, New York University, Hughes Research Laboratory, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Keysight Technologies, Qualcomm, MIT, Lincoln Laboratory, Shared Spectrum Company, Verizon, and Google. Key areas the team will explore include science users, air traffic management, communications, radars, wide area radio frequency sensing including low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations, radio layer innovations with particular emphases on machine learning and networking around small cells, implementation aspects of 6G and THz band systems, and policy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.