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.

Do you program or manage programming in any capacity? Please take our floating point survey.

If you have a smartwatch, you may be interested in our WAMP application monitor in the Android market. more info
If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad and want to know where you are based on the sound of the room, you may be interested in the Batphone indoor localization app.
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 (NSF Awards)
  • Gokhan Memik, PI (Intel Award)
  • Robert Dick, co-PI (NSF) (University of Michigan)
  • 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, now at the University of Pittsburgh
  • Arindam Mallik, ECE Ph.D. student, now at IMEC, Belgium
  • Jack Cosgrove, ECE M.S. student, currently at Neurobehavioral Systems
  • Alex Shye, ECE Ph.D. student, now at Qualcomm Research
  • Lei Yang, ECE Ph.D. 2008, now at Google
  • Benjamin Scholbrock, ECE Ph.D. student
  • J. Scott Miller, CS Ph.D. student, currently at ZS Associates
  • Pan Yan, ECE Ph.D. student
  • Stephen Tarzia, ECE Ph.D. student, currently at VaporStream
  • Matt Schuchhardt, ECE Ph.D. student
  • Utku Pamuksuz, ECE Ph.D. student
  • Maciej Swiech, CS Ph.D. student
  • Abhinav Kannan, ECE M.S. student
  • Prem Seetharaman, undergraduate student (NSF REU)
  • Jason Lee, undergraduate student (NSF REU)

    • Talks

  • Prospects for Shaping User-centric Mobile Application Workloads to Benefit the Cloud, Peter Dinda, MASCOTS 2016 (pptx)
  • Analyzing Power Consumption and Characterizing User Activities on Smartwatches: Summary, Emirhan Poyraz, IISWC 2016
  • Optimizing Mobile Display Brightness by Leveraging Human Visual Perception, Matt Schuchhardt, CASES 2015
  • CAPED: Context-aware Personalized Display Brightness for Mobile Devices, Matt Schuchhardt, CASES 2014
  • Panappticon: Event-based Tracing to Optimize Mobile Application and Platform Performance, Robert Dick, CODES-ISSS 2013 (pdf)
  • Making JavaScript Better By Making It Even Slower, Maciej Swiech, MASCOTS 2013 (pdf)
  • Understanding the Impact of Laptop Power Saving Options on User Satisfaction Using Physiological Sensors, Matt Schuchhardt, ISLPED 2012 (pdf)
  • The Hand Clap as an Impulse Source for Measuring Room Acoustics, Prem Seetharaman, AES 2012 (pdf)
  • Understanding End-user Perception of Network Problems, Peter Dinda, SIGCOMM W-MUST 2011 (pdf)
  • Indoor Localization without Infrastructure using the Acoustic Background Spectrum, Steve Tarzia, MobiSys 2011 (pdf demo video listen for yourself)
  • 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 (ppt)
  • 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 (Best Paper Nominee) (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)
  • User-driven Scheduling of Interactive Virtual Machines, Bin Lin, Grid 2004 (powerpoint) and related preliminary poster on VSched (powerpoint)
  • Measuring and Understanding User Comfort With Resource Borrowing, Ashish Gupta, HPDC 2004 (powerpoint)

    • Papers

  • B. Egilmez, E. Poyraz, W. Zhou, G. Memik, P. Dinda, N. Alshurafa, UStress: Understanding College Student Subjective Stress Using Wrist-Based Passive Sensing, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on on Sensing Systems and Applications using Wrist Worn Smart Devices (WristSense 2017), March, 2017. pdf (Best Paper)

  • G.Huang, H. Cai, M. Swiech, Y. Zhang, X. Liu, P. Dinda, DelayDroid: An Instrumented Approach to Reducing Talk-time Energy of Android Apps, Science China Information Sciences, Volume 59, 2016 (Accepted, To Appear)

  • M. Swiech, H.Cai, P. Dinda, G. Huang, Prospects for Shaping User-centric Mobile Application Workloads to Benefit the Cloud, Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2016), September, 2016. pdf

  • I. Poyraz, G. Memik, Power Modeling and Characterizing User Activities on Smartwatches: Summary, Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC 2016), September, 2016. pdf

  • M. Swiech, Controlling Green Users for a Happier Cloud, Doctoral Disseration, September, 2016. Available as Technical Report NWU-EECS-16-13, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University. pdf

  • M. Schuchhardt, S. Jha, R. Ayoub, M. Kishinevsky, G. Memik, Optimizing Mobile Display Brightness by Leveraging Human Visual Perception, Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Compilers, Architecture and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES 2015), October, 2015. pdf

  • M. Swiech, H. Cai, P. Dinda, G. Huang, Prospects for Shaping User-centric Mobile Application Workloads to Benefit the Cloud, Technical Report NWU-EECS-15-2, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, May, 2015. pdf

  • M. Schuchhardt, S. Jha, R. Ayoub, M. Kishinevsky, G. Memik, CAPED: Context-aware Personalized Display Brightness for Mobile Devices, Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Compilers, Architecture and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES 2014), October, 2014. pdf

  • L. Zhang, D. Bild, R. Dick, Z. Mao, P. Dinda, Panappticon: Event-based Tracing to Optimize Mobile Application and Platform Performance, Proceedings of the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES-ISSS 2013), September, 2013. pdf

  • M. Swiech, P. Dinda, Making JavaScript Better By Making It Even Slower, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2013), August, 2013. pdf

  • M. Swiech, P. Dinda, Making JavaScript Better By Making It Even Slower, Technical Report NWU-EECS-13-02, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, April, 2013. pdf

  • L. Zhang, M. Gordon, R. Dick, Z. Mao, P. Dinda, L. Yang, ADEL: An Automatic Detector of Energy Leaks for Smartphone Applications, Proceedings of the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES-ISSS 2012), October, 2012. pdf

  • L. Yang, R. Dick, G. Memik, P. Dinda, HAPPE: Human and Application Driven Frequency Scaling for Processor Power Efficiency, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), Volume 12, Number 8, pages 1546-1557, August, 2013. (Spotlight Paper) pdf

  • M. Schuchhardt, B. Scholbrock, U. Pamuksuz, G. Memik, P. Dinda, R. Dick, Understanding the Impact of Laptop Power Saving Options on User Satisfaction Using Physiological Sensors, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED 2012), July-August, 2012. pdf

  • P. Seetharaman, S. Tarzia, The Hand Clap as an Impulse Source for Measuring Room Acoustics, Proceedings of the 132nd Convention of the Audio Engineering Society (AES 2012), April, 2012. pdf iOS App

  • S. Tarzia, Acoustic Sensing of Location and User Presence on Mobile Computers, Doctoral Disseration, August, 2011. Available as Technical Report NWU-EECS-11-09, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University. pdf

  • J. S. Miller, A. Mondal, R. Potharaju, P. Dinda, A. Kuzmanovic, Understanding End-user Perception of Network Problems, Proceedings of the Workshop on Measurements Up the STack (W-MUST 2011), August, 2011. pdf

  • S. Tarzia, P. Dinda, R. Dick, G. Memik, Indoor Localization without Infrastructure using the Acoustic Background Spectrum, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2011), June--July, 2011. pdf iOS App

  • T. Chantem, X. S. Hu, R. P. Dick, Temperature-aware scheduling and assignment for hard real-time applications on MPSoCs, IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, to appear. pdf

  • S. Yazji, R. P. Dick, P. Scheuermann, G. Trajcevski, Protecting Private Data on Mobile Systems Based on Spatio-Temporal Analysis, Proceedings of the International Conference on Pervasive and Embdeded Computing and Communication Systems (PECCS 2011), March, 2011. pdf

  • S. Yazji, R. P. Dick, P. Scheuermann, G. Trajcevski, Efficient Intrusion Detection for Mobile Devices Using Spatio-Temporal Mobility Patterns, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (MobiQuitous 2010), December, 2010. pdf

  • X. Chen, C. Xu, R. P. Dick, Memory access aware on-line voltage control for performance and energy optimization, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD 2010), November, 2010. pdf

  • L. Zhang, B. Tiwana, Z. Qian, Z. Wang, R. P. Dick, Z. M. Mao, L. Yang, Accurate Online Power Estimation and Automatic Battery Behavior Based Power Model Generation for Smartphones, Proceedings of the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS 2010), October 2010. pdf

  • 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. (Best Paper Nominee) 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.

  • B. Lin, P. Dinda, D. Lu, User-driven Scheduling of Interactive Virtual Machines, Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid 2004). 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 grants CNS-0720691 and CNS-1265347, by a gift from Intel Corporation, and by previous awards noted in the relevant past projects' sites. Jack Lange was supported by a Symantec Research Labs Fellowship.