On-Line Management of Embedded Systems and Integrated Circuits

This talk has the goal of indicating potentially promising sensing and computer system design and synthesis problems for control researchers. It will introduce ongoing projects on a number of embedded system and integrated circuit design and management problems for which control plays an important role.
The talk will address the following questions related to sensing systems. How can the design of correct wireless sensing applications be made accessible to those who most need these systems, instead of merely to embedded systems programming experts? What control algorithms are necessary to permit adaptation to discrete component faults, varying communication performance, and changing data properties?
High power consumption and temperature now limit the performance of computing systems. Proactive control techniques can increase performance, given a constraint on peak temperature. We will describe prior work on dynamic power-thermal management of multi-core processors and indicate unsolved problems in system analysis. In addition, we will sketch a framework for viewing the global data center management problem from a control perspective.

Robert Dick is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University and his Bachelor's degree from Clarkson University. He worked as an Associate Professor at Northwestern University, a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, and a Visiting Researcher at NEC Labs America. Robert received an NSF CAREER award and won his department's Best Teacher of the Year award in 2004. His technology won a Computerworld Horizon Award and his paper was selected by DATE as one of the 30 most influential in the past 10 years in 2007. He served as a technical program subcommittee chair for the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems and serves on the technical program committees of several embedded systems and CAD/VLSI conferences.