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Padmanabhan Pillai

padmanabhan dot s dot pillai at intel dot com

4720 Forbes Ave. Suite 410
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
(412) 297-4100
(412) 297-4110 (fax)

Biography

Padmanabhan (Babu) Pillai joined the Intel Research Lab in Pittsburgh in September, 2003, after finishing his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he worked with Prof. Kang Shin at the Real-Time Computing Lab (RTCL). He received his M.S. from U. Michigan in 1999, and a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1996 from Carnegie Mellon University.

Research

Babu has a wide range of interests, primarily in computer science systems research. He is currently working on the SLIPstream project and on the Dynamic Physical Rendering (DPR) (a.k.a. Claytronics) project.

SLIPstream is a new project that seeks to enable interactive applications driven by real-time processing of high-rate streaming data. In particular, a goal of the project is to parallelize and execute expensive vision and video processing algorithms in an interactive fashion using clusters of compute nodes. Unlike traditional efforts at cluster parallelization, which focus on aggregate throughput, for interactive applications, parallel computation needs to be carefully applied to reduce latency as well. Achieving strict latency goals may require significant modification and development of new algortithms that can effectively make use of cluster computational resources. Research goals of SLIPstream include investigating various techniques for runtime adaptation, refactoring applications, and constructing algorithms amenable to such techniques.

The DPR project seeks to create a new form of programmable matter that can be shaped and dynamically animated under software control. The idea is to build such a material from a myriad of tiny robotic modules that connect to and actuate against each other, forming an ensemble that can be reconfigured and reshaped at will. Although this sounds like science fiction, the DPR and Claytronics projects are serious research endeavors investigating the extremes of systems research:

  • design and implementation of extremely small computational platforms;
  • communication, coordination, and control in very large distributed, multi-agent systems;
  • design of applications, algorithms, programming languages, and methodologies that scale to millions of distibuted processors working in tandem

Babu's past work includes research on Internet-scale wide area sensor systems, storage strategies for rich media data, and low-power embedded devices. In particular, his thesis work primarily dealt with low-power, real-time, embedded systems. This work focused on four major aspects of energy conservation in mobile, real-time systems:

  • Increasing efficiency of OS services;
  • Aggressively exploiting hardware power reduction mechanisms;
  • Adapting task service quality to maximize benefits;
  • Measuring task energy for feedback and developing energy models.
Babu continues to have an active research interest in all of these areas.

Selected Publications

Daniel Dewey, Michael Ashley-Rollman, Michael De Rosa, Sidd Srinivasa, Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, Seth Copen Goldstein, Todd Mowry, "Generalizing metamodules to simplify planning in modular robotic systems," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, September, 2008.

Stanislav Funiak, Michael Ashley-Rollman, Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, Seth Copen Goldstein, "Distributed Localization of Modular Robot Ensembles," in Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, June, 2008.

Michael De Rosa, Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, Seth Copen Goldstein, Peter Lee, "Programming Modular Robots with Locally Distributed Predicates," in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2008.

Michael DeRosa, Seth Copen Goldstein, Peter Lee, Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Distributed Watchpoints: Debugging Large Ensembles of Robots," in International Journal on Robotics Research, Special Issue on Modular Robotics, 2008.

Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Collective Actuation," in International Journal on Robotics Research, Special Issue on Modular Robotics, 2008.

Michael Ashley-Rollman, Michael De Rosa, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Padmanabhan Pillai, Seth Copen Goldstein, Jason Campbell, "Declarative Programming for Modular Robots," in Self-Reconfigurable Robots/Systems and Applications Workshop at IROS 2007.

Stanislav Funiak, Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, "Internal Localization of Modular Robot Ensembles," in Self-Reconfigurable Robots/Systems and Applications Workshop at IROS 2007.

Michael Ashley-Rollman, Seth Copen Goldstein, Peter Lee, Todd Mowry, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Meld: A declarative Approach to Programming Ensembles," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2007.

Brian Kirby, Burak Aksak, James Hoburg, Todd Mowry, Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, Seth Goldstein, "A Modular Robotic System Using Magnetic Force Effectors," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2007.

Ashish Deshpande, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Control Strategies and Design Guidelines for Planar Latch-less Metamorphic Robots Based on Analysis of Dynamics," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2007.

Michael De Rosa, Peter Lee, Seth Copen Goldstein, Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, Todd Mowry, "Distributed Watchpoints: Debugging Large Multi-Robot Systems," in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 2007.

Benjamin Rister, Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, Todd Mowry, "Integrated Debugging of Large Modular Robot Ensembles," in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 2007.

Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, Gautam Kedia, Shishir Mougdal, Kaushik Sheth, "A 3D Fax Machine based on Claytronics," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), Ocober, 2006.

Dilip Sundarraj, Phillip Gibbons, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Ensuring Spatio-Temporal Consistency in Distributed Networks of Smart Cameras," in Distributed Systems of Cameras Workshop at ACM Sensys, November, 2006.

Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason Campbell, "Sensing and Reproducing the Shapes of 3D Objects Using Claytronics," Demo Abstract at ACM Sensys, November, 2006.

Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Collective Actuation," in Workshop on Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots at RSS'06, August, 2006.

Michael DeRosa, Seth Copen Goldstein, Peter Lee, Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Distributed Watchpoints: Debugging Very Large Ensembles of Robots," in Workshop on Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots at RSS'06, August, 2006.

Michael DeRosa, Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, Seth Copen Goldstein, Peter Lee, "Scalable Shape Sculpting via Hole Motion: Motion Planning in Lattice-Constrained Modular Robots," in Proccedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2006.

J. Campbell, P. Gibbons, S. Nath, P. Pillai, S. Seshan, R. Sukthankar, "IrisNet: A Planetary-Scale Architecture for Multimedia Sensors," in ACM Multimedia, November, 2005.

Aksak, Bhat, Campbell, DeRosa, Funiak, Gibbons, Goldstein, Guestrin, Gupta, Helfrich, Hoburg, Kirby, Kuffner, Lee, Mowry, Pillai, Ravichandran, Rister, Seshan, Sitti, Yu, "Claytronics: Highly scalable communications, sensing, and actuation networks," Demo Abstract at ACM Sensys, November, 2005.

Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, Seth Goldstein, "The Robot is the Tether: Active, Adaptive Power Routing for Modular Robots With Unary Inter-robot Connectors," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, August, 2005.

B. Kirby, J. Campbell, B. Aksak, P. Pillai, T. Mowry, S. Goldstein, "Catoms: Moving Robots Without Moving Parts," Demo abstract at AAAI, July, 2005.

L. Huston, A. Nizhner, P. Pillai, R. Sukthankar, P. Steenkiste, J. Zhang, "Dynamic Load Balancing for Distributed Search," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, July, 2005.

Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, "Leveraging Limited Autonomous Mobility to Frame Attractive Group Photos," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 2005.

Larry Huston, Rahul Sukthankar, Jason Campbell, Padmanabhan Pillai, " Forensic Video Reconstruction," ACM 2nd International Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks, October, 2004.

Padmanabhan Pillai, Yan Ke, Jason Campbell, "Multi-fidelity Storage," ACM 2nd International Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks, October, 2004.

Hani Jamjoom, Padmanabhan Pillai, Kang Shin, "Re-synchronization and Controllability of Bursty Service Requests," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, August, 2004.

P. Pillai, H. Huang, and K. G. Shin, "Energy-Aware Quality of Service Adaptation," submitted to ACM Transactions on Embedded Computer Systems.

H. Huang, P. Pillai, and K. G. Shin, "Design and Implementation of Power-Aware Virtual Memory," in Proceedings of USENIX Technical Conference, June 2003.

H. Huang, P. Pillai, and K. G. Shin, "Improving Synchronization-Free Algorithms for Interprocess Communication in Embedded Real-Time Systems," in Proceedings of USENIX Technical Conference, June 2002.

P. Pillai and K. G. Shin, "Real-Time Dynamic Voltage Scaling for Low-Power Embedded Operating Systems," in Operating Systems Review 35(5):89-102, Oct. 2001.
( 18th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP'01 )

K. M. Zuberi, P. Pillai, and K. G. Shin, "EMERALDS: A Small-Memory Real-Time Microkernel," in Operating Systems Review 34(5):277-291, Dec. 1999.
( 17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP'99 )

K. M. Zuberi, P. Pillai, K. G. Shin, W. Nagaura, T. Imai, and S. Suzuki, "EMERALDS-OSEK: A Small Real-Time Operating System for Automotive Control and Monitoring," in Society of Automotive Engineers Congress and Exposition, Mar. 1999. SAE Technical Paper Series 1999-01-1102.

S.-W. Moon, P. Pillai, and K. G. Shin, "STREAMER: Hardware Support for Smoothed Transmission of Stored Video over ATM," in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1417, pp. 75-88, 1997.
( Parallel Computer Routing and Communication Workshop, June 1997 )