Another PhD defense which received the highest distinction

CISTER/INESC-TEC PhD student Muhammad Ali Awan has successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled “Energy and Temperature Aware Real-Time Systems” in University of Porto under the supervision of Dr. Stefan M. Petters. Ali was enrolled in a doctoral program in electrical and computer engineering (PDEEC) jointly taught by CISTER/INESC-TEC and FEUP. It is the third PhD defense from CISTER in 2014 and also the third one to receive the highest distinction!

The dissertation attempts to provide energy efficient solutions and techniques to cope with the current trends in modern embedded computing systems, while closing the gap between theoretical research and practice. In particular, it focuses on operating system-level power management and exploits the available sleep states to improve on energy efficiency while mainly concentrating on leakage power dissipation. Various aspects of the system (CPU, I/O devices, thermal management etc.) have been explored for a large range of hardware platforms. The proposed solutions have lower online complexity and consider more realistic power models when compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Outcomes of this research have been published in many reputed international conferences such as ECRTS, RTAS, RTCSA, RTNS, SIES and ICESS. In addition to this, four more works are under submission in renowned journals.

The president of the jury was Professor Jose Alfredo Ribeiro da Silva Matos, director of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Porto. The two “local” reviewers were the Associate Professor Luis Miguel Pinho Almeida and the Assistant Professor Mario Jorge Rodrigues de Sousa from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, also from the University of Porto, and the two “external” reviewers were the Professor Gerhard Fohler, director of Real-Time Systems group at Technische Universitat Kaiserslautern, Germany and the Associate Professor Marko Bertogna from Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche, Universita di Modena e Reggio Eimilia, Italy. These external members are highly respected researchers in the field of Real-Time Systems. 

Last but not least, Ali is now joining CISTER/INESC-TEC as a PostDoc researcher!