FuSe-TG: Regaining the Edge

该项目汇集了来自学术界和工业界的不同专家社区，共同探索设计未来边缘计算机的技术。这些计算机将能够不受束缚地运行数周或数月，同时提供先进的功能，如人工智能、与人类的无缝接口、多种传感模式、与云的高速通信以及强大的安全性。实现这一愿景需要在能源效率、安全和隐私技术以及计算、通信和传感的集成方面取得突破。目前的设计实践不太可能产生这些突破，因为他们的竖井范式迫使材料科学家、设备工程师、计算机架构师和算法设计师在彼此相对隔离的情况下工作，并且跨越刚性接口，这已经达到了极限。研究团队将利用其广泛的专业知识来探索新材料、设备、架构和算法的协同设计，依靠流体界面和跨级模拟器来发现潜在的能效改进数量级，从而为边缘计算机提供下一代应用、安全、传感和通信功能。它还将探索硕士水平的劳动力发展计划，培养具有协同设计专业知识的行业毕业生。研究小组将围绕一系列季度研讨会聚集在一起，讨论节能设备和架构、隐私保护的安全技术、自适应操作的软硬件协同设计，以及用于高带宽通信和传感的分布式处理。与来自行业的应用领域专家合作，将在占据边缘计算机设计光谱不同部分的两个特定用例的背景下探索这四个主题：分布式可穿戴设备和深度嵌入式健康植入物，以及分布式自主代理（例如，车辆，无人机）。除了揭示跨设计抽象层的重要协同作用的潜力之外，研讨会和随后的交互预计将产生一个精心策划的数据和软件框架，该框架由现有的数据集、接口、工具和模拟器组成，并包括在每个抽象层内以及跨抽象层执行框架的设计活动示例。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project brings together a diverse community of experts from academia and industry to explore technologies for designing the edge computers of the future. These computers will be capable of untethered operation for weeks or months while providing advanced features such as artificial intelligence, seamless interfacing with humans, multiple sensing modalities, high-speed communication with the cloud, and robust security. Realizing this vision calls for breakthroughs in energy efficiency, security and privacy technologies, and the integration of computing, communication, and sensing. Current design practices are unlikely to yield these breakthroughs, as their siloed paradigm that coerces materials scientists, device engineers, computer architects, and algorithm designers to work in relative isolation from each other and across rigid interfaces has reached its limits. The research team will leverage its wide-ranging expertise to explore the co-design of novel materials, devices, architectures, and algorithms, relying on fluid interfaces and cross-level simulators to uncover potentially orders of magnitude in energy efficiency improvements that enable next-generation application, security, sensing, and communication features for edge computers. It will also explore workforce development programs at the master’s level that yield industry-bound graduates with co-design expertise.The research team will come together around a series of quarterly workshops on energy-efficient devices and architectures, security technologies for privacy protection, hardware-software co-design for adaptive operation, and distributed processing for high-bandwidth communication and sensing. In collaboration with application-domain experts from industry, these four themes will be explored in the context of two specific use-inspired cases that occupy different parts of the edge-computer design spectrum: distributed wearables and deeply embedded implants for health, and distributed autonomous agents (e.g., vehicles, drones). In addition to exposing the potential for significant synergies across the design abstraction layers, the workshops and ensuing interactions are expected to yield a curated data and software framework that consists of existing data sets, interfaces, tools, and simulators and includes examples of design activity that exercises the framework within each abstraction layer as well as across abstraction layers.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.