News
May 23, 2012
UIUC's Kumar Wins ARO Young Investigator Award
Variability Expedition co-PI Rakesh Kumar has received the Army Research Office's Young Investigator Award for 2012. The professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was cited for his research on algorithmic techniques for building robust applications -- a topic Kumar is pursuing as part of the Variability Expedition as well.

Apr 26, 2012
Variability Researcher Wins Outstanding Faculty Award
On April 20, Variability Expedition executive director Yuvraj Agarwal was honored with the Outstanding Faculty Award from the UCSD campus-wide sustainability initiative. He was also cited for his leadership role in the Systems, Networking, and Energy Efficiency (Synergy)lab. [more]

Mar 30, 2012
Best IP Award Nomination
A paper by UC Irvine PIs Nikil Dutt and Alex Nicolau was nominated for the Best IP Award at the 2012 Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), which took place in Dresden, Germany in March 2012. The paper was "VaMV: Variability-aware Memory Virtualization." [more]

Dec 6, 2011
EE Times' 20 hot technologies for 2012
A wireless sensor system developed at the University of Michigan in 2010 used multiple stacked die with a solar cell energy source as the top layer. [more]

Nov 21, 2011
Prof. Puneet Gupta gives a talk on UnO Computing at ATS
Prof. Puneet Gupta gave an invited talk on Underdesigned and Opportunistic Computing at the Asian Test Symposium in New Delhi, India. This was in a session on robust systems research organized by Prof. Mitra.

Nov 19, 2011
Gupta Invited to Deliver Talk at Asian Test Symposium in November 2012
Co-PI Puneet Gupta delivered an invited talk at the IEEE Asian Test Symposium. He delivered a joint paper with Variability PI Rajesh Gupta on "Underdesigned and Opportunistic Computing". The 20th ATS took place in November 2012 in New Delhi, India. [more]

Oct 31, 2011
Best Paper Award Nomination
UC Irvine PI Nikil Dutt reports that his group received a Best Paper Award nomination at the IEEE ACM IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS) in Taipai, Taiwan in October 2011. The paper was "SPMVisor: Dynamic ScratchPad Memory Virtualization for Secure, Low Power and High Performance Distributed On-Chip Memories." [more]

Oct 24, 2011
UCI Team Paper Nominated at CODES+ISSS 2011
UC Irvine's Luis Angel D. Bathen is back from the Oct. 9-14 CODES+ISSS conference in Taiwan. He and Variability co-PI Nikil Dutt, and other co-authors Dongyun Shin and Sung-Soo Lim from Korea's Kookmin University, received a Best Paper Award Nomination. It was for their paper on "SPMVISOR: Dynamic Scratchpad Memory Virtualization for Secure, Low Power and High Performance, Distributed On-Chip Memories." CODES+ISSS -- the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis -- was part of Embedded Systems Week in Taipei. [more]

Sep 16, 2011
Variability Student Receives Best in Session Award
This week UIUC graduate student Joseph Sloan received a Best in Session award for his talk on algorithmic techniques for approximate fault correction for sparse linear algebra. The talk was delivered at the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) TECHCON 2011 in Austin, TX, where roughly 200 graduate students networked with 214 industry members of SRC. [more]

Sep 15, 2011
Variability Research to Be Showcased at 49th Annual Allerton Conference
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Sept. 29, Variability investigators will deliver invited papers, including 'Tackling Intercell Variability in TLC Flash through Error Correcting Codes' (UCLA and UCSD co-authors)and 'Probabilistic Design of Robust Circuits and Systems' (UCLA and Stanford). [more]

Sep 13, 2011
UIUC Members Win Best Paper
Co-PI Rakesh Kumar at UIUC co-authored a paper on 'Algorithmic Techniques for Fault Detection for Sparse Linear Algebra', which received the Best Paper in Session Award at the Semiconductor Research Corp.'s TECHCON conference, which took place in Austin, TX, in mid-September 2011. [more]

Aug 20, 2011
Variability Outreach at UCLA Completes Inaugural Program
Under the umbrella of the Variability Expedition, UCLA's new Los Angeles Computing Circle (LACC) outreach program completed its inaugural 8-week program on August 19. Eight high-schoolers from around California worked in the labs of Variability co-PIs Lara Dolecek, Puneet Gupta and Mani Srivastava. They learned various aspects of programming through specially-designed teaching modules and challenging programming assignments. The program culminated in a poster session. [more]

Jul 27, 2011
La Jolla Light Features Variability Outreach
The La Jolla Light newspaper took note of the Variability Expedition's MyLab outreach activity at UCSD, where girls aged 7 to 16 from underserved communities spent six weeks learning the basics of building simple electromechanical systems. [more]

Jul 27, 2011
Rajesh Gupta Upcoming Talks in China, NSF
Variability Expedition PI Rajesh Gupta will deliver a CISE Distinguished Lecture next Jan. 19, 2012, at the National Science Foundation. Meanwhile, he has a trip to China and two talks there on his agenda. On Aug. 8, Gupta will focus on Variability for an audience in the Computer Science department of the City University of Hong Kong; and on Aug. 4 he'll deliver the first keynote at the IEEE/ACM GreenCom conference, in Chengdu, China (see Events for more details).

Jul 24, 2011
Variability PI Chairs CASES 2011 Program
Variability Expedition PI Rajesh Gupta from UC San Diego is the Program Chair for the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures and Synthesis of Embedded Systems (CASES). The forum for emerging technology in embedded computing systems takes place Oct. 9-14 in Taipei, Taiwan. In related news, the conference has accepted "FFT-Cache: A Flexible Fault-tolerant Cache Architecture for Ultra Low Voltage Operation," a paper by UCI's Abbas BanaiyanMofrad, Houman Homayoun and Nikil Dutt. [more]

Jul 23, 2011
Variability Outreach Blends Fashion, Engineering
At UCSD, MyLab @ Variability Expedition, with support from ViaSat, got young girls age 7 to 16 excited about the basics of electro-mechanical engineering. Two dozen girls from an underserved community were part of the six-week, hands-on engineering program at Calit2 that culminated this week, when they took part in opening day of the racing season at Del Mar -- and showed off their hats driven by gears and electronics in the annual hat contest. [more]