Sudeep Pasricha, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Monfort Professor, has received the Rockwell-Anderson Professorship. Pasricha is also director of the Embedded Systems and High Performance Computing Laboratory.

“I’m very appreciative of this support. This is essential for academics who are heavily invested in doing research to improve our quality of life and push the frontiers of what is possible. I feel validated in the path I’ve chosen to solve and to jump into this sea of unknown, very hard, challenging problems,” Pasricha said.

Embedded sensors, smartphones, supercomputers

Pasricha’s research interests are broad, spanning the areas of energy-efficient and fault-tolerant algorithms and architectures for embedded systems and mobile computing and high performance computing. He is interested in technologies as small as embedded sensors, to smartphones and supercomputers.

For example, Pasricha is working to reduce energy consumption in data centers to keep information flowing while cutting down operation costs for companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. He is also exploring ways to make smartphones last longer on a single battery charge, an improvement that has implications for the everyday cell phone user, as well as those who rely on communication technology in emergency scenarios like earthquakes and hurricanes.

One of his new projects involves accurately locating miners in underground mines using smartphones. His system would require devices to operate with high energy efficiency and to provide continuous location updates for miners.

The nature of Pasricha’s research lends itself especially well to industry, and his students benefit from this connection. Pasricha is advising 18 Ph.D. and master’s students, and 15 undergraduate students. Many of Pasricha’s former students work in the technology sector, pursuing careers in hardware and software design at companies like IBM, Synopsys, Intel, Nvidia and Google.

Grateful for the support of the Rockwell-Anderson Professorship, Pasricha hopes to expand his research interests even more in the future, including in the area of security