Computer Science Colloquium

Monday, September 20, 2021 @ 10 am CST (Room: CS 209)

https://umsystem.zoom.us/j/91549819586 (Passcode: 1234)

Collaborative Machine Intelligence:

Enabling Low-Power Pervasive AI

Prof. Archan Misra
Singapore Management University

Abstract: 

Pervasive computing applications often assume a distributed sensing substrate, incorporating both personal (mobile and wearable) devices and an IoT infrastructure (including devices such as radar and vision sensors). To support real-time & sustainable machine intelligence that exploits the rapid growth in such sensor-generated data, there is a need to optimize the execution of AI/ML pipelines on such resource-constrained embedded devices. In fact, assuring adequate and ubiquitous availability of power to such devices remains the most serious resource bottleneck and requires advances on both the supply side (new forms of energy harvesting) and the demand side (new forms of ultra-low power inferencing). Through this talk, I shall describe how collaborative machine intelligence (CMI), where the sensing and inferencing pipelines on individual wearable and IoT devices collaborate in real-time, helps tackle this power challenge. First, I will describe work on advances in battery-less, or low-power sensing, enabled by such collaboration. Second, using an exemplar video surveillance application, I will describe how CMI can provide dramatic reductions in energy overheads, as well as improvements in accuracy. I shall conclude by describing the emergence of a “Cognitive and Collaborative Edge”, that evolves from its current focus on mere computation offloading to a platform for enabling such collaborative and trusted sense-making.

Bio: Dr. Archan Misra is Vice Provost (Research) and Professor of Computer Science at Singapore Management University (SMU). He has led a number of multi-million-dollar, flagship research initiatives at SMU, including the LiveLabs research center and SMU’s Center for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics (CASA), that have focused on exploiting pervasive sensing for novel smart-city applications, Over a 20+ year research career spanning both academics and industry (at IBM Research and Bellcore), Dr. Misra has published extensively on, and practically deployed, technologies spanning wireless networking, mobile and wearable sensing and urban mobility analytics. His current research interests lie in ultra-low energy execution of machine intelligence algorithms using wearable and IoT devices. He is a current recipient of the prestigious Investigator grant (from Singapore’s National Research Foundation) for sustainable man-machine interaction intelligence. Dr. Misra holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park and chaired the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) from 2005-2007.