Keynote Address 2: Enabling Energy-Centric Mobile App Design
Charlie Hu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Purdue University
Despite the incredible market penetration of smartphones and the app market, the user experience has been plagued by the limited battery life. Worse, battery technology has barely improved in the past decade, while smartphone hardware is becoming more powerful and power hungry. Ultimately, it is the apps running on the smartphone that drain the battery, yet the first million or so apps released in the app market have competed in features and were largely developed in an energy-oblivious manner. As a result, energy drain of different versions of popular apps easily differ by 2x, suggesting significant room for improvement. Yet without automatic tools, finding energy problems in the app source code is like finding needles in a haystack.
In this talk, I will describe the journey we have taken since 2010 towards developing enabling technologies that help to shift app design from feature-centric to energy-centric. I will discuss the design and implementation of the first fine-grained energy profiler, eprof, that answers the very question "where was the energy spent in the app?" as well as the first set of automatic energy bug detection techniques. These software development tools empower app developers to pinpoint energy bottlenecks and energy bugs in the complex app source code.
Y. Charlie Hu is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard in 1997. His research interests lie broadly in mobile systems, distributed systems, operating systems, and computer networking. Since 2010, he has conducted pioneering work on energy profiling and energy debugging on smartphones which has been cited over 450 times, and widely covered by news media such as ABC News, NBC News, BBC, Times of India, MIT Tech Review, and Scientific American.
author = {Charlie Hu},
title = {Keynote Address 2: Enabling {Energy-Centric} Mobile App Design},
year = {2014},
address = {Broomfield, CO},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
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