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Center for Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded Applications and Systems (IDEAS)

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the Center author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Center Overview

The Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded Applications and Systems (IDEAS) Center addresses a broad range of industry-relevant, application-driven projects. Its work involves co-designing smart hardware and software that sense, collect, compute, communicate and control the world around us. Its scope includes smart wearables, mobile devices, edge and cloud computing, and embedded systems targeting extreme energy efficiencies and high performance.

Universities

Arizona State University
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
University of Southern California

View Center Website

Center Personnel

Sarma Vrudhula
Center Director
+1 480 727 4152
vrudhula@asu.edu

Viktor Prasanna
Site Director, University of Southern California
+1 213 740 4483
prasanna@usc.edu

Spyros Tragoudas
Site Director, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
+1 618 453 7027
spyros@siu.edu

Research Focus

The IDEAS Center addresses a broad range of application-driven projects to advance the technologies of wearables, mobile devices, edge and cloud computing, and embedded systems targeting energy efficiency and performance. IDEAS products are in the form of fundamental new knowledge and software and hardware prototypes.

Applications: IDEAS focuses on Distributed Intelligent Applications at the edge. These are applications that require executing intelligent decision-making algorithms in a distributed manner on edge devices, by learning parameterized models from massive amounts of data. The underlying paradigm of these applications is commonly referred to as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and it is expected to serve as the basic framework for automation of control and decision-making tasks of practically every major industry. IDEAS undertakes projects addressing the efficient implementation of Distributed Intelligent Applications such as smart energy systems, smart infrastructure, autonomous driving, industrial Internet of Things (IoT), sensing and monitoring, IoT reliability and robustness, and anomaly detection. Other application domains are also explored if there is an interest from an industrial partner.

Robotics for warehouse, manufacturing, industrial, and agricultural automation
Autonomous vehicles
Resource management in 5G/6G wireless networks
Smart energy grid

Embedded Systems: IDEAS also addresses a system of interconnected embedded heterogeneous devices deployed on the edge. These devices exhibit immense heterogeneity across several dimensions, such as power, compute capabilities, and memory and interconnect technologies. The center focuses on optimizations targeting embedded systems which are hierarchical, multi-layered systems of emerging compute nodes that include heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) and reconfigurable devices.

Custom hardware accelerators for AI/ML in CMOS+X application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)
Compute-in-memory with heterogeneous processor and memory technologies
Heterogeneous platforms: CPU + GPU + FPGAs

Awards

2231662

IUCRC Phase I University of Southern California: Center for Intelligent Distributed Embedded Applications and Systems (IDEAS)

Internet of Things devices – more than 43 billion in use – make our lives easier. Today’s devices mostly watch, collect, and transmit data to be analyzed elsewhere. The IDEAS Center will drive current technology to enable devices to analyze the data, learn from data, make decisions and act on those decisions in coordination with other devices. These smarter devices will revolutionize every aspect of life: healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, ecommerce, transportation, microelectronics, manufacturing, entertainment, aerospace and many more. IDEAS will collaborate with companies in all these industries to improve their business practices and provide them with employees trained in these technologies.

IDEAS’ work, “Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded, Applications and Systems,” addresses fundamental challenges as the present two-layer structure of the internet (user-end devices at one end and datacenters at the other), evolves into a massive, distributed network of computers that will provide computing as a service. Companies in critical industries must exploit emerging opportunities that are possible as IoT, edge-cloud infrastructure, 5G communications and intelligent computing converge. USC-IDEAS will focus on edge applications such as data driven asset monitoring enabled by low latency inference, multi-agent planning and reconfigurable systems.

IDEAS’ technologies will help make access to data, information, and decision making through computers as pervasive and common place as roads, public transportation, hospitals, and other public services that are part and parcel of our daily lives. The technology will also be extremely energy efficient so that businesses can not only radically improve their operating efficiency, but also make their enterprises more environmentally sustainable. IDEAS will train future engineers and scientists from all segments of society to further advance these technologies. Collaborative mentoring will promote entrepreneurial research among the students to foster the next generation of ground-breaking discoveries.

IDEAS will build and maintain a single Center-wide data repository. It will be maintained for IUCRC Phases I and II, and for any subsequent years of center operation. It will be developed following IUCRC best practices for securing, documenting, and reporting data. While initially it will be cloud-based, we will integrate any physical infrastructure requirements such as servers or other hardware as needed. Strong password-protection and duo-authentication properties will be integrated as needed.

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. Read More >

2231623

IUCRC Phase I Southern Illinois University Carbondale: Center for Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded, Applications, and Systems (IDEAS)

Internet of Things devices – more than 43 billion in use – make our lives easier. Today’s devices mostly watch, collect, and transmit data to be analyzed elsewhere. The IDEAS Center will drive current technology to enable devices to analyze the data, learn from data, make decisions, and act on those decisions in coordination with other devices. These smarter devices will revolutionize every aspect of life: healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, e-commerce, transportation, microelectronics, manufacturing, entertainment, aerospace, and many more. IDEAS will collaborate with companies in all these industries to improve their business practices and provide them with employees trained in these technologies.

IDEAS’ work, “Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded Applications and Systems,” addresses fundamental challenges as the present two-layer structure of the internet (user-end devices at one end and data centers at the other), evolves into a massive, distributed network of computers that will provide computing as a service. Companies in critical industries must exploit possible emerging opportunities as IoT, edge-cloud infrastructure, 5G communications, microelectronics, and intelligent computing converge. SIUC-IDEAS will focus on reliable, power-efficient, and accelerated deep learning on devices, design reliable embedded systems with testing and validation capabilities, edge computing for intelligent embedded systems, and modeling communications between distributed systems.

IDEAS’ technologies will help make access to data, information, and decision-making through computers as pervasive and commonplace as roads, public transportation, hospitals, and other public services that are part and parcel of our daily lives. The technology will also be extremely energy efficient so that businesses can not only radically improve their operating efficiency but also make their enterprises more environmentally sustainable. IDEAS will train future engineers and scientists from all segments of society to further advance these technologies. Collaborative mentoring will promote entrepreneurial research among the students to foster the next generation of ground-breaking discoveries.

IDEAS will build and maintain a single Center-wide data repository. It will be maintained for IUCRC Phase I and for any subsequent years of center operation. It will be developed following IUCRC best practices for securing, documenting, and reporting data. While initially, it will be cloud-based, we will integrate any physical infrastructure requirements such as servers or other hardware as needed. Strong password protection and duo-authentication properties will be integrated as needed.

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. Read More >

2231620

IUCRC Phase I Arizona State University: Center for Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded, Applications and Systems (IDEAS)

Internet of Things devices – more than 43 billion in use – make our lives easier. Today’s devices mostly watch, collect, and transmit data to be analyzed elsewhere. The IDEAS Center will drive current technology to enable devices to analyze the data, learn from data, make decisions, and act on those decisions in coordination with other devices. These smarter devices will revolutionize every aspect of life: healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, e-commerce, transportation, microelectronics, manufacturing, entertainment, aerospace, and many more. IDEAS will collaborate with companies in all these industries to improve their business practices and provide them with employees trained in these technologies.

IDEAS’ work, “Intelligent, Distributed, Embedded Applications and Systems,” addresses fundamental challenges as the present two-layer structure of the internet (user-end devices at one end and data centers at the other), evolves into a massive, distributed network of computers that will provide computing as a service. Companies in critical industries must exploit possible emerging opportunities as IoT, edge-cloud infrastructure, 5G communications, microelectronics, and intelligent computing converge. ASU-IDEAS will focus on domain-specific robotics, hardware-software codesign of AI/ML accelerators at the edge, intelligent sensors at the edge, and design of distributed edge-cloud computing systems – all targeting extreme energy efficiency for sustainable computing.

IDEAS’ technologies will help make access to data, information, and decision-making through computers as pervasive and commonplace as roads, public transportation, hospitals, and other public services that are part and parcel of our daily lives. The technology will also be extremely energy efficient so that businesses can not only radically improve their operating efficiency, but also make their enterprises more environmentally sustainable. IDEAS will train future engineers and scientists from all segments of society to further advance these technologies. Collaborative mentoring will promote entrepreneurial research among the students to foster the next generation of ground-breaking discoveries.

IDEAS will build and maintain a single Center-wide data repository. It will be maintained for IUCRC Phase I and for any subsequent years of center operation. It will be developed following IUCRC best practices for securing, documenting, and reporting data. While initially it will be cloud-based, we will integrate any physical infrastructure requirements such as servers or other hardware as needed. Strong password protection and duo-authentication properties will be integrated as needed.

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. Read More >

Member Organizations

IUCRC affiliated member organizations are displayed as submitted by the Center. Non-federal organizations are not selected, approved, or otherwise endorsed by the National Science Foundation.