A proposal from a Cullen professor about the potential of nearby devices to work together when cloud servers are unavailable or fail has received funding from the latest round of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER awards.
Biresh Kumar Joardar, an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, is the principal investigator for the research, “Reliable and Communication-Aware Ad-hoc Teaming and Collaborative Computing for Cloudless AI at the Edge.” The total award is for $490,204.
According to Joardar’s proposal abstract, many smart devices often depend on cloud servers to process data and run complex tasks like AI. When connections fail because of outages or weak network connections, systems stop working.
“This project develops a new way for nearby devices to form teams on the fly, share their computing power and solve complex problems together without relying on the cloud,” he wrote. “The goal is to make technology more reliable, especially in places where internet access is limited or unreliable, and to support critical applications like disaster response and remote healthcare.”
The NSF CAREER program is a significant early milestone for professors. The competitive process supports early-career faculty that have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Joardar joined the faculty at Cullen for the 2022-23 academic year. He earned his Ph.D. from Washington State. Previous to Cullen, he worked as a Computing Innovation Fellow at Duke for two years.
“I would like to express my sincere gratitude to our department chair, Dr. Ji Chen, and my colleagues, Dr. Harish Krishnamoorthy and Dr. Xin Fu at the University of Houston, for their unwavering support, encouragement, and guidance throughout this journey. I am also deeply grateful to my mentors, Dr. Partha Pratim Pande and Dr. Janardhan Rao Doppa at Washington State University, and Dr. Krishnendu Chakrabarty at Arizona State University, for their invaluable mentorship, insightful feedback, and continued support during the development of this proposal.”
He added, “I would also like to acknowledge the outstanding contributions of the many Ph.D., master's, and undergraduate students whose dedication and hard work have significantly supported and inspired this proposal.”
Joardar’s research focuses on the synergy between machine learning and reliable high-performance computer system design. The aim is to develop a symbiotic relationship between hardware design and machine learning; where hardware researchers benefit from new data-driven algorithms, and researchers benefit from new computing paradigms enabled by hardware-software co-design.
Joardar currently has openings in his lab for Ph.D. students. For more information, visit his research website.