Let's teach battery perservation in Computer Science

In a society that is increasingly moving towards always-on mobile ubiquity, graduates of computer science degrees can be trained to write code that dramatically saves battery life. Mobile technology is affordable, and it is easy to teach about battery consumption when learning to code.

Apple's OSX Maverick unveiled at WWDC today unveiled a battery preservation technology that has been available in Windows for about 4 years. Timer Coalescing combines disparate background tasks onto the same clock cycle so that the CPU spends more time idling. As explained from Apple's whitepaper, it synchronizes thread processing to increase CPU idle time.

Before Timer Coalescing

After Timer Coalescing

While energy saving hardware has advanced significantly in recent years, software development techniques remain relatively unchanged. Clay Bershear's post on energy efficient programming talks about how programmers can save power with vector operations, limiting loop increment complexity, and simpler code. Power consumption simulators such as ENERJ will allow developers to understand how much power their software consumes during development. Companies are also documenting exactly how much power each operation consumes.

I was once told that a prominent GPU producer had measured the amount of energy that every operation (computation, access to memory, moving data in from off-card, etc.) took on its products.

I could see programming assignments for creating an algorithm that sorts 10K random items with less than 0.1W of power. Or an JPEG compressor that uses less than 0.5W per 15 megapixel bitmap.

I'd love to hear what ideas can you think of.

PhD in Cow Town (Calgary)?

Today I read another comment posted on a blog regarding my research in natural speech and gesture interaction over digital tables. The quote is:

Thats right baby CALGARY! Cow town my (expletive removed)!!! More like TECH town!! -iDextrose

People often make assumptions about particular Universities based on word of mouth or sometimes profiles made by people not attending University themselves. Sometimes these reviews are useful for selecting a place for undergraduate education, but most reviews do not detail life as a graduate student.

The graduate programme is a whole different ball game, you can't just use word of mouth or external profiles to select your graduate degree. Each university's research agenda specializes in different areas and you need to find out what area you are particularly interested in.

My message is: Discover your passions and find a community that shares your ambitions. Where you go to school doesn't matter, your community is what's most important.

Are You Satisfied?

Here's a comment that I recently read about my Warcraft III Video on YouTube (link). It goes something like this:

OMGZ SO (expletive removed) COOL U GUYS ARE AWESOME AND MUST GET LAID LIKE CRAZY -notastonner96

There is this interesting quote from Mick Jagger of Rolling Stones fame from the 60s when he was at a press conference and a female reporter asked him if he was satisfied. "What do you mean?" he responded "Do you mean sexually, financially, or philosophically? I think we're: Sexuaully satisified, financially dissatisfied, and philosophically trying."

I think the appropriate response for the typical academic researcher would be: "Sexually dissatisfied, financially dissatisfied, but philosophically rocking!" A quote from an interview with Bill Gates states "This isn't the rock-and-roll industry. The computer industry doesn't have groupies like rock does."

So, you have to understand the humor in a researcher hearing a comment like this about his work. Who says that research in computers can't be sexy?