Vivienne Sze, a core member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the Emanuel E. Landsman (1958) Career Development Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, has received a 2014 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award.
Sze’s group, the Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems, is working to develop technologies to enable energy-efficient and high-performance systems for visual data processing such as video coding, imaging, and computer vision. The group focuses on joint design across various levels of abstraction, from energy-aware algorithm development for signal processing to efficient architecture design and low-power, very-large-scale integration circuit implementation to enable optimal tradeoffs between power, speed, and quality of result.
With the goal of energy-efficient systems for a wide range of applications, Sze’s group has designed hardware that performs real-time object detection and video decoding on high-definition video content while consuming less than a nanojoule per pixel. Enabling real-time energy-efficient visual data processing can not only benefit many of today's portable-multimedia applications (phone, tablet, etc.), but can impact a wide range of emerging video-based applications ranging from improved safety through elderly assistance, advanced driver assistance systems, and crime prevention to increased efficiency through structural monitoring, smart homes, unmanned vehicles, and traffic control.
DARPA selects rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions with the goal of developing the next generation of academic scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in key disciplines who will focus a significant portion of their career on Department-of-Defense and national-security issues.
