The Cognitive Edge: Promoting Energy-Efficient, Collaborative Sensing by IoT & Personal Devices

Archan Misra
School of Information Systems,
Singapore Management University.

Abstract

Edge computing is viewed primarily as a mechanism to support localized computation offload from individual resource-constrained pervasive devices. Through this talk, I introduce the vision of a Cognitive Edge, where an edge computing platform offers a suite of Learning & Inferencing Services that enables energy-efficient, machine intelligence on such resource-poor platforms. First, I will describe work on tightly coordinated IoT+ wearable sensing, which allows the capture of fine-grained human gestural activities in various environments (e.g., in offices and in gyms) by combining wireless (RF) sensing with battery-less pervasive devices. Second, I will describe work on IoT-based collaborative machine learning & inferencing, using a sample video surveillance application to illustrate how such edge-coordinated collaboration can provide dramatic reductions in energy and latency while improving accuracy. Finally, I shall conclude by describing open challenges for such a Cognitive Edge architecture.

Biography

Archan Misra is a Professor, and the Associate Dean of Research, in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU). He is the Director of SMU's Center for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics (CASA), which is developing pervasive technologies for smart city infrastructure and applications. Over a 20+ year research career spanning both academics and industry (at IBM Research and Bellcore), Archan has published extensively on a broad set of technologies spanning wireless networking, mobile & wearable computing and data analytics. His current research interests lie in energy-efficient, fine-grained mobile, wearable and IoT sensing to understand human activities and ambient context for a variety of urban-computing and industrial applications. Archan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park, and chaired the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) from 2005-2007.