Title: Embracing Failure: Axioms and Future Directions of Intermittent Computing

Speaker: Josiah Hester

Abstract: For decades, smart devices (i.e., wireless sensing and computing systems) have relied primarily on battery power. Yet, batteries are bulky, expensive, high-maintenance, and unsustainable for the next trillion devices. Instead of relying on energy stored in a battery, the past decade has seen new approaches enabling battery-free, energy-harvesting smart devices. These devices compute intermittently, losing power, harvesting energy, restoring computational state, and finally continuing execution from the last checkpoint. This new paradigm has required rethinking programming models, operating systems, hardware and architecture design, tool creation, and evaluation techniques. In this talk, I will discuss the broad implications of what a battery-free, trillion-device IoT means, outline previous work on the topic, and then try to synthesize standard axioms and research frameworks from this work in the past decade– axioms that might guide (or be a starting point) for the next period of research in intermittent computing towards realizing a sustainable IoT.

Short Bio: Josiah Hester is the Allchin Chair and Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His work focuses on reimagining computing for sustainability, specifically investigating battery-free embedded systems and intermittent computing, with applications in health, conservation, and interaction. Josiah was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022.