ESP - The Empathic Systems Project

The Empathic Systems Project explores how to incorporate end-user satisfaction and guidance in computer systems and computer architecture design and implementation. You can find out more about the vision of the project in this paper. You may also be interested in this course. If you're a member of our group, you can also see our wiki.

If you're working with Google Android phones, you may be interested in the PowerTutor power monitor.
If you have a Windows or Linux laptop, notebook, or netbook, you may want to participate in our work by trying out our sonar-based display power manager.
If you own a Google Android phone, you may want to participate in our work by trying out NU Jam Logger.

People

  • Peter Dinda, PI
  • Gokhan Memik, co-PI
  • Robert Dick, co-PI
  • Bin Lin, CS Ph.D, 2007, now at Intel
  • Ashish Gupta, CS Ph.D. 2008, now at D.E. Shaw
  • Jack Lange, CS Ph.D. student
  • Arindam Mallik, ECE Ph.D. student
  • Jack Cosgrove, ECE M.S. student
  • Alex Shye, ECE Ph.D. student
  • Benjamin Scholbrock, ECE Ph.D. student
  • J. Scott Miller, CS Ph.D. student
  • Pan Yan, ECE Ph.D. student
  • Stephen Tarzia, ECE Ph.D. student

    • Talks

  • Display Power Management Policies in Practice, Steve Tarzia, ICAC 2010 (pdf)
  • Characterizing and Modeling User Activity in Smartphones, Ben Scholbrock, SIGMETRICS 2010 (pdf)
  • EmNet: Satisfying the Individual User Through Empathic Home Networks, Jack Lange, INFOCOM 2010 (To Appear)
  • Into the Wild: Studying Real User Activity Patterns to Guide Power Optimization for Mobile Architectures, Alex Shye, MICRO 2009 (powerpoint)
  • EmNet: Satisfying the Individual User Through Empathic Home Networks: Summary, Scott Miller and Jack Lange, SIGMETRICS 2009 (powerpoint)
  • Sonar-based Measurement of User Presence and Attention, Steve Tarzia, UbiComp 2009 (pdf)
  • Sonar-Based Measurement of User Attention, Steve Tarzia, USENIX 2009 (pdf)
  • Experiences with Scheduling and Mapping Games for Adaptive Distributed Systems, Bin Lin, ICAC 2009 (powerpoint)
  • User- and Process-Driven Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, Peter Dinda, ISPASS 2009 (powerpoint)
  • Power to the People: Leveraging Human Physiological Traits to Control Microprocessor Frequency, Alex Shye, MICRO 2008 (powerpoint)
  • Experiences with Client-based Speculative Remote Display, Jack Lange, USENIX 2008 (powerpoint)
  • Learning and Leveraging the Relationship between Architectural-level Measurements and Individual User Satisfaction, Alex Shye, ISCA 2008 (powerpoint)
  • PICSEL: Measuring User-Perceived Performance to Control Dynamic Frequency Scaling, Jack Cosgrove, ASPLOS 2008 (powerpoint)
  • Empathic Computer Architectures and Systems, Alex Shye, ASPLOS WACI 2008 (powerpoint)
  • Time-sharing Parallel Applications With Performance Isolation And Control, Bin Lin, ICAC 2007, (pdf)
  • Power Reduction Through Measurement and Modeling of Users and CPUs, Bin Lin and Ardindam Mallik, SIGMETRICS 2007 (powerpoint)
  • The User In Experimental Computer Systems Research, Peter Dinda, ExpCS 2007 (powerpoint)
  • Towards Scheduling Virtual Machines Based On Direct User Input, Bin Lin, VTDC 2006 (pdf)
  • VSched: Mixing Batch and Interactive Virtual Machines Using Periodic Real-time Scheduling, Bin Lin, SC 2005 (powerpoint)
  • Measuring and Understanding User Comfort With Resource Borrowing, Ashish Gupta, HPDC 2004 (powerpoint)

    • Papers

  • S. P. Tarzia, P. A. Dinda, R. P. Dick, G. Memik, Display Power Management Policies in Practice, Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communications (ICAC 2010), June, 2010. pdf

  • A. Shye, B. Scholbrock, G. Memik, P. Dinda, Characterizing and Modeling User Activity in Smartphones: Summary, Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS '10 Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS 2010), June, 2010. pdf

  • J. S. Miller, J. R. Lange, P. A. Dinda, EmNet - Satisfying The Individual User Through Empathic Home Networks, Proceedings of the 29th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2010), March 2010. pdf

  • J. S. Miller, A. Mondal, R. Potharaju, P. Dinda, A. Kuzmanovic, Network Monitoring is People: Understanding End-user Perception of Network Problems, Technical Report NWU-EECS-10-04, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, March, 2010. pdf

  • A. Shye, B. Scholbrock, G. Memik, Into the Wild: Studying Real User Activity Patterns to Guide Power Optimization for Mobile Architectures, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2009), December, 2009. pdf

  • S. Tarzia, R. Dick, P. Dinda, G. Memik, Sonar-based Measurement of User Presence and Attention, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2009), September, 2009. pdf A live demonstration will also be given.

  • S. Tarzia, R. Dick, P. Dinda, G. Memik, Sonar-Based Measurement of User Attention (poster) , Proceedings of the Usenix Annual Technical Conference (USENIX 2009), June, 2009. pdf A live demonstration was also given.

  • J. S. Miller, J. R. Lange, P. A. Dinda, EmNet: Satisfying the Individual User Through Empathic Home Networks: Summary, Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS 2009, June, 2009. pdf

  • J. S. Miller, J. R. Lange, P. Dinda, EmNet: Satisfying the Individual User Through Empathic Home Networks, Technical Report NWU-EECS-09-05, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, April, 2009. pdf

  • B. Lin, P. Dinda, Experiences With Scheduling and Mapping Games for Adaptive Distributed Systems: Summary, Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2009), June, 2009. pdf

  • S. Tarzia, R. Dick, P. Dinda, G. Memik, Prospects for Sonar-based Measurement of User Attentiveness, Technical Report NWU-EECS-09-06, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, April, 2009. pdf

  • B. Lin, A. Mallik, P. Dinda, G. Memik, R. Dick, User- and Process-driven Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS 2009), April, 2009. pdf

  • A. Shye, Y. Pan, B. Scholbrock, J. S. Miller, G. Memik, P. Dinda, R. Dick, Power to the People: Leveraging Human Physiological Traits to Control Microprocessor Frequency, Proceedings of the 41st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2008), November, 2008. pdf

  • B. Lin, A. Sundararaj, and P. Dinda, Time-sharing Parallel Applications With Performance Isolation and Control, accepted by Cluster Computing, Volume 11, Number 3, September 2008. pdf

  • J. Lange, P. Dinda, S. Rossoff, Experiences With Client-based Speculative Remote Display, Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX 2008), June, 2008. pdf

  • A. Shye, B. Ozisikyilmaz, A. Mallik, G. Memik, P. Dinda, R. Dick, A. Choudhary, Learning and Leveraging the Relationship between Architectural-level Measurements and Individual User Satisfaction, Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2008), June, 2008. pdf

  • A. Mallik, Holistic Computer Architectures based on Application, User, and Process Characteristics, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, June, 2008. pdf

  • A. Mallik, J. Cosgrove, R. Dick, G. Memik, P. Dinda, PICSEL: Measuring User-Perceived Performance to Control Dynamic Frequency Scaling, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2008), March, 2008. pdf

  • A. Shye, L. Yang, X. Chen, B. Oziskyilmaz, A. Mallik, B. Lin, G. Memik, P. Dinda, R. Dick, Empathic Computer Architectures and Systems, ASPLOS Wild and Crazy Ideas Session VI (WACI-VI), March, 2008, pdf

  • B. Lin, Human-driven Optimization, Doctoral Dissertation, Technical Report NWU-EECS-07-04, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, July, 2007. pdf

  • B. Lin, A. Mallik, P. Dinda, G. Memik, R. Dick, Power Reduction Through Measurement and Modeling of Users and CPUs: Summary, Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS 2007, June, 2007. pdf

  • P. Dinda, G. Memik, R. Dick, B. Lin, A. Mallik, A. Gupta, S. Rossoff, The User In Experimental Computer Systems Research, Proceedings of the Workshop on Experimental Computer Science (ExpCS 2007), June, 2007. pdf

  • A. Mallik, B. Lin, G. Memik, P. Dinda, and R. Dick, User-Driven Frequency Scaling, Computer Architecture Letters, Volume 5, Number 2, July-December, 2006. pdf.

  • B. Lin, P. Dinda, Towards Scheduling Virtual Machines Based On Direct User Input, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing (VTDC 2006), November, 2006, pdf

  • A. Mallik, B. Lin, P. Dinda, G. Memik, and R. Dick, Process and User Driven Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, Technical Report NWU-EECS-06-11, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, August, 2006, pdf.

  • S. Rossoff, and P. Dinda, Prospects for Speculative Remote Display, Technical Report NWU-EECS-06-08, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, August, 2006, pdf.

  • B. Lin, and P. Dinda, Putting the User in Direct Control of CPU Scheduling, Technical Report NWU-EECS-06-07, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, July, 2006, pdf.

  • B. Lin, and P. Dinda, VSched: Mixing Batch and Interactive Virtual Machines Using Periodic Real-time Scheduling, Proceedings of ACM/IEEE SC 2005 (Supercomputing), November, 2005. pdf

  • B. Lin, and P. Dinda, Vsched: Mixing Batch and Interactive Virtual Machines Using Periodic Real-time Scheduling, Technical Report NWU-CS-05-06, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, April, 2005, pdf.

  • A. Gupta, B. Lin, P. Dinda, Measuring And Understanding User Comfort With Resource Borrowing, Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2004), pdf

  • A. Gupta, B. Lin, and P. Dinda, A Framework and Toolkit for Understanding User Comfort with Resource Borrowing, Technical Report NWU-CS-04-28, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, February, 2004. pdf.

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    Relevant Past Projects

  • Virtuoso Project
  • Clairvoyance Project

    • Acknowledgements

    This project is made possible by support from the National Science Foundatation (NSF) via grant CNS-0720691, and by previous awards noted in the relevant past projects' sites. Jack Lange is supported by a Symantec Research Labs Fellowship.