Prof. Giovanni De Micheli, head of the Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), has taken over the scientific direction of the EPFL EcoCloud Center from Prof. David Atienza, head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL).
Prof. De Micheli previously founded and directed the EPFL Integrated Systems Center (SI), and was co-founder and Program Leader of the Nano-Tera.ch program. As for Prof. Atienza, he now takes on the post of Associate Vice-President for Centers and Platforms at EPFL.
Almost as if to mark the occasion of this handover, and as a demonstration of how far back the collaboration between De Micheli and Atienza actually goes, last week they received a joint test-of-time award for a paper published in 2007.
The award ceremony took place at ESWEEK 2024, the Embedded Systems Week conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. It recognizes papers published at least 15 years ago, indicating that it has had a lasting influence on modern system design. The 2007 paper, Temperature-aware Processor Frequency Assignment for MPSoCs Using Convex Optimization, featured an early adoption of temperature-aware frequency control in Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chips. This exciting technology explored optimization methods to solve processor frequency assignments, in a bid to reduce energy consumption and make temperature gains in small devices.
This paper has had a lasting impact on the field of embedded systems. Two of the authors, ESL alumnus Dr. Srinivasan Murali and David Atienza, along with ESL alumnus Dr. Francisco Rincon, would later found the EPFL spin-off SmartCardia, which now designs and manufactures wearable medical devices.
The synergy generated from this kind of collaboration is what makes EcoCloud so exciting, bringing together the ingenuity of different researchers for holistic results, in ways that are adopted by industry, in tangible products.
What a great fanfare for the new Director of EcoCloud, and the new AVP for Centers and Platforms!