Kang G. Shin receives 2023 SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award

Kang G. Shin, Kevin and Nancy O’Connor Professor of Computer Science at U-M, and his former student Padmanabhan Pillai (PhD CSE 2004) have been selected as the recipients of the 2023 SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award. The award recognizes the excellence and sustained influence of their paper, Real-time dynamic voltage scaling for low-power embedded operating systems, presented at the 2001 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP’01).

SIGMOBILE, the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems Users, Data, and Computing, recognizes just a few papers each year with this prestigious award, which aims to honor research that is at least a decade old that has had a significant and lasting impact on the mobile computing field.

Shin’s paper introduced a technique for integrating real-time dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) into embedded systems, enabling significant improvements in energy efficiency. Specifically, his DVS algorithms integrate into and modify the scheduler in embedded real-time systems. By accounting for the deadlines and periodicity of tasks within these systems, his DVS method results in significant energy savings while maintaining guaranteed response times. In fact, his DVS algorithm was shown to reduce energy consumption in embedded systems by 20 to 40%, a major breakthrough for mobile technologies that were emerging at the time.

The impact of Shin’s groundbreaking work on this topic continues to be felt; mobile system designers continue to use this real-time DVS approach to enhance energy efficiency. His scholarship paved the way for the design of stronger-performing and more efficient real-time embedded systems, which are ubiquitous in a variety of applications today.