CAREER: Elastic Intermittent Computation Enabling Batteryless Edge Intelligence

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to advance smart homes, cities, industries, and healthcare. It is projected to reach a market value of $4.5 trillion by 2035. However, challenges include the environmental impact and disposal issues of battery-powered devices, and their limited processing power and memory. This highlights a need for sustainable, efficient IoT solutions. This CAREER project innovates duty-cycle-variable computing, proposing Elastic Intermittent Computation foundations, which will be advanced through application, architecture, and circuit-level design flows, by: (1) understanding and modeling the intermittent behavior of batteryless edge intelligence, and designing efficient intermittent-robust IP cores to ensure uninterrupted operation via a novel automated framework; and (2) exploring existing machine learning training algorithms and developing hardware-software co-design strategies for energy/intermittent-aware scheduling and execution. The technologies developed through this CAREER project promise to reduce electronic waste and carbon emissions as the world moves toward the era of a trillion connected, batteryless things. This research aims to advance sustainable computing, supporting the shift towards a carbon-neutral society. Developing batteryless processing and learning systems will enhance innovations in key sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, and defense, focusing on affordability and reliability. Alongside the research on sustainable smart devices, this CAREER project will launch hands-on education programs, from high school through the graduate level, exploring real-world applications of the underlying concepts. A Practice for Practical Problems initiative will also be introduced, emphasizing computational thinking and real-world challenges, assisting in bridging the gap between high-tech industries and conventional teaching programs. It seeks to prepare a diverse future workforce in computer science and engineering, with programs designed for high-school teachers and students. This initiative will particularly benefit rural students with limited access to such opportunities, thus broadening their educational and career horizons in technology and engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.