Yubo Luo

Yubo Luo, Shahriar Nirjon

We propose SmartON, a batteryless system that learns to wake up proactively at the right moment in order to detect events of interest. It does so by adapting the duty cycle to match the distribution of event arrival times under the constraints of harvested energy. While existing energy harvesting systems either wake up periodically at a fixed rate to sense and process the data, or wake up only in accordance with the availability of the energy source, SmartON employs a three-phase learning framework to learn the energy harvesting pattern as well as the pattern of events at run-time, and uses that knowledge to wake itself up when events are most likely to occur. The three-phase learning framework enables rapid adaptation to environmental changes in both short and long terms. Being able to remain asleep more often than a CTID (charging-then-immediate-discharging) wake-up system and adapt to the event pattern, SmartON is able to reduce energy waste, increase energy efficiency, and capture more events. To realize SmartON we have developed a dedicated hardware platform whose power management module activates capacitors on-the-fly to dynamically increase its storage capacitance. We conduct both simulation-driven and real-system experiments to demonstrate that SmartON captures 1X--7X more events and is 8X--17X more energy-efficient than a CTID system.

Seulki Lee, Bashima Islam, Yubo Luo et al.

This paper introduces intermittent learning - the goal of which is to enable energy harvested computing platforms capable of executing certain classes of machine learning tasks effectively and efficiently. We identify unique challenges to intermittent learning relating to the data and application semantics of machine learning tasks, and to address these challenges, we devise 1) an algorithm that determines a sequence of actions to achieve the desired learning objective under tight energy constraints, and 2) propose three heuristics that help an intermittent learner decide whether to learn or discard training examples at run-time which increases the energy efficiency of the system. We implement and evaluate three intermittent learning applications that learn the 1) air quality, 2) human presence, and 3) vibration using solar, RF, and kinetic energy harvesters, respectively. We demonstrate that the proposed framework improves the energy efficiency of a learner by up to 100% and cuts down the number of learning examples by up to 50% when compared to state-of-the-art intermittent computing systems that do not implement the proposed intermittent learning framework.