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Embedded systems are special-purpose computers built into devices not generally considered to be computers. For example, the computers in vehicles, wireless sensors, medical devices, wearable fitness devices, and smartphones are embedded systems. The embedded systems market is growing 50% faster than that for general-purpose computing.
Designing embedded systems is a huge challenge because they have so many requirements: they often need to be tiny, high-performance, inexpensive, reliable, and last a long time on poor power sources, all while sensing and influencing their surroundings. Computer engineering research in this area covers the entire “stack,” from transistors and circuits to operating system and applications.
Research in this area includes the following projects:
- Cyber-Physical Systems, integrating a network of embedded real-time computing systems with physical systems like time embedded application ground and space vehicles.
- Wired and wireless networking, including robust Internet protocols, wireless LANs/WANs, cognitive radio networks, and sensor networks.
- Computation and network security, including lightweight systems (e.g., handhelds and sensor networks) and enterprise systems & networks.
- Low-power embedded real-time OS, middleware, and storage systems.
- Virtualization-based resource management for large-scale Internet services and servers.
- Body-Area Networks
In the domain of vehicular computing, we are building distributed systems that better connect the vehicle to edge and cloud infrastructure. This enables, for example, offload of complex processing of rich vehicular sensor data to enable novel consumer and safety applications. We are also building novel OS abstractions for managing user attention as a resource, with a goal of minimizing distracted driving and mobile device operation.