CAREER: Reinventing Smartphones for Sensing

这个NSF CAREER项目的驱动愿景是一款能看、能听、能感觉的智能手机，从而持续为用户服务。智能手机已经包含了各种各样的传感器，比如摄像头、麦克风、加速度计、GPS等等。一个新兴的、重要的智能手机应用类别需要使用传感器来了解物理世界和人类用户，通常是在后台进行的，无需用户参与。然而，现有和新兴的智能手机平台在这种传感应用中存在根本性缺陷：它们采用集中式处理模型，总是使用日益强大的中央处理器，即使是非常简单的任务，特别是传感器数据处理。当智能手机频繁感应时，这种模式会导致不可接受的电池寿命。为了解决这个根本性的缺陷，这个项目的目标是通过采用一种异构的分布式处理模型来重塑智能手机平台，该模型将弱处理器集成到简单、频繁的任务中。该研究有三个目标：(i)通过运行时和编译器支持，将开发人员从处理异构、分布式处理模型中解脱出来；（ii）支持使用异构、分布式资源的第三方应用程序的高效和安全执行；（iii）提供设想的异构智能手机硬件的优化设计和实现，包括板和芯片集成。虽然该项目的重点是类似智能手机的系统，但研究结果有望支持具有异构、分布式资源的通用嵌入式系统。该研究项目还提供了一个多学科平台，以实现为移动嵌入式计算课程开发系统和实验组件的教育目标，让本科生参与可发表的研究，并向高中学生和这些领域中代表性不足的群体推广科学和工程研究。

The driving vision of this NSF CAREER project is a smartphone that can see, hear, and feel and therefore serve the user continuously. Smartphones have embraced a variety of sensors, such as cameras, microphones, accelerometers, GPS, and more. An emerging, important category of smartphone applications requires the use of sensors to learn about the physical world and the human user, often in the background without user engagement. However, existing and emerging smartphone platforms are fundamentally flawed for such sensing applications: they adopt a centralized processing model that always uses the increasingly powerful central processor, even for very simple tasks, in particular sensor data processing. This model leads to unacceptable battery lifetime when a smartphone senses frequently.To address this fundamental flaw, this project targets at reinventing the smartphone platform by adopting a heterogeneous, distributed processing model that incorporates weak processors for simple, frequent tasks. The research has three objectives: (i) Relieve developers from dealing with the heterogeneous, distributed processing model with runtime and compiler support; (ii) Support efficient and secure execution for third-party applications that use heterogeneous, distributed resources; (iii) Provide optimized design and realization of the envisioned heterogeneous smartphone hardware, including both board and chip integrations. While the project has a focus on smartphone-like systems, the research results are expected to support general embedded systems with heterogeneous, distributed resources. The research project also provides a multidisciplinary platform to realize the educational objectives of developing system and experimental components for mobile embedded computing curriculum, involving undergraduate students in publishable research, and promoting science and engineering studies to high-school students and to groups underrepresented in these areas.