SBIR Phase I: Enabling Techologies for Energy-Centric Mobile App Design to Extend Mobile Device Battery Life

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力可以概括如下。(1)社会影响：PI关于解剖AngryBirds能量消耗并揭露其低效的开创性研究被全球500多家新闻媒体报道。这种兴趣反映了移动计算设备在社会各阶层日益增长的重要性。智能手机是发达国家和发展中国家弱势群体接入互联网的重要手段，因此是克服“数字鸿沟”的重要工具，因此这项工作的重要性更加突出。(2)商业影响：该项目开发的节能应用设计技术将导致更长的电池续航时间，进而延长用户的移动视线时间，最终转化为当今大型企业向移动转型带来的数百万美元的收入增加。拟议的SBIR项目的商业成果将导致适销对路的产品和/或工艺。(3)技术影响：这项工作将把软件行业的性能分析技术基础扩展到对移动软件行业至关重要的能源维度。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目将解决帮助应用程序开发者编写节能应用程序的几个关键技术挑战，这有望延长移动设备的电池寿命，并最终改善用户的移动体验。研究的目标是(1)开发运行在数百万用户手机上的移动应用的能源分析，并激励开发人员采用以能源为中心的应用设计范式；(2)开发多分辨率的应用能源配置技术，使开发人员更容易在应用设计过程中采用这些技术；(3)开发节能编程指南和模板，以帮助应用开发人员首先编写节能应用。这些目标带来了重大的技术挑战。虽然对于传统软件，特别是在高性能计算方面，性能指标(例如运行时间)上的类似挑战已经得到了很好的研究，但这个项目将把他们带到移动软件行业的能源维度，这是以前从未尝试过的。该公司预计将开发第一套解决方案，以优化数百万移动应用程序的能量消耗，以应对这些根本挑战。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project can be summarized as follows. (1) Societal impact: The PI's initial ground-breaking research on dissecting the energy drain of AngryBirds and exposing its inefficiency was covered by over 500 news media outlets worldwide. This interest reflects the growing importance of mobile computing devices in all strata of society. The importance of this work is heightened by smartphones being an important enabler of Internet access for disadvantaged people in both developed and developing countries, and hence being an important tool in overcoming the "digital divide". (2) Commercial impact: The technologies developed in this project for enabling energy-efficient app design will lead to longer battery life, which in turn leads to longer mobile eye time of users, which ultimately translates into millions of dollars of increased revenue to large businesses today as they transition towards mobile. The commercial outcome of the proposed SBIR project will lead to a marketable product and/or process. (3) Technological impact: This work will extend the performance profiling technology foundational to the software industry to the energy dimension, which is critical to the mobile software industry.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will tackle several key technical challenges in helping app developers to write energy-efficient apps, which holds the promise of extending the battery life of mobile devices and ultimately improving user mobile experience. The research objectives are (1) to develop energy analytics of mobile apps running on millions of users' phones and incentivize developers to adopt an energy-centric app design paradigm; (2) to develop technologies for app energy profiling with multiple resolutions which will make it easier for developers to adopt them in their app design process; (3) to develop energy-efficiency programming guidelines and templates for helping app developers to write energy-efficient apps in the first place. These objectives pose significant technical challenges. While similar challenges on the performance metric (e.g. running time) have been well studied for traditional software, in particular in high-performance computing, this project will take them to the energy dimension for the mobile software industry, which has not been attempted before. The company expects to develop the first set of solutions to these fundamental challenges in optimizing the energy drain of millions of mobile apps.