Systems Research Towards Solving Societal Problems
Systems Research Towards Solving Societal Problems
February 27, 2023
Abstract: Much of systems and networking research focusses on improving performance, often defined in terms of throughput, latency, and robustness. Our lab have been focusing on systems research that also has societal impact. I will describe two such research threads: one on sustainable NLP and the other on accessibility
In the first part of the talk, I will describe systems optimizations we have developed that significantly reduce the compute, memory, and energy requirement of large NLP models. The optimizations we developed can be applied broadly and results in over 10x reduction in energy. Beyond optimizations, we have been working on accurate energy prediction of large NLP models. Existing energy prediction approaches are not accurate, making it difficult for developers and practitioners to reason about their models in terms of energy. I will describe our work on developing an accurate and interpretable energy model for NLP applications.
In the second part of the talk, I will describe our work on improving the accessibility of smartphone applications for users with disabilities. Blind users face several challenges when interacting with applications starting from fast-draining battery to having to use difficult touchscreen gestures. I will describe our work that builds on virtualization techniques to make smartphone interactions significantly more accessible.
Speaker Bio: Aruna Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. She received her Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her dissertation won the UMass outstanding dissertation award and was the Sigcomm dissertation award runner up. She works in the area of networked systems. Her current work consists of three threads: (1) significantly improving Quality of Experience of Internet applications, and (2) improving the usability, accessibility, and privacy of mobile systems, and (3) sustainable NLP.
She is the recipient of the SIGMobile Rockstar award, a Ubicomp best paper award, a Computing Innovation Fellowship, a VMWare Early Career award, several Google research awards, and the Applied Networking Research Prize. She is passionate about improving the diversity in Computer Science and leads the diversity committee in the department, is the faculty advisor for the WiCS and WPhD groups at Stony Brook, and is an active member of the N2Women group.