Through the lab door...

Research destined to transform Intel
March 7, 2007

This year’s Open House at the Intel Research lab in Berkeley showcased Intel’s close connection to students and faculty at University of California, Berkeley, as well as other top universities and industry labs. Intel researchers and students came together for the day, presenting more than 30 demos and posters and walking visitors and press through all aspects of their work.

Exploring the lab and talking with the researchers, one could easily see how their projects are fulfilling the Intel Research vision of what Andrew Chien, vice president of the Corporate Technology Group and director of Intel Research, defines as “Essential Computing.” What is Essential Computing? (View short video). According to Chien, it is “computing that simplifies and enriches all aspects of work and daily life.”

The charter of Intel Research is to, “Drive off-roadmap, high-impact exploratory research vital to Intel.” The talented researchers who are part of Intel Research’s lablets deliver every day by conducting exploratory, cross-disciplinary research fueled by close engagements with academic and industry researchers. Their efforts include:

• Broad engagement and collaboration with universities;
• Small, exploratory research projects; and,
• World-class research to identify, explore and drive disruptive, off-roadmap technologies.

Come into the lab

More than 30 demos were presented during the course of the Open House. Just a few of what was shown are detailed below. 

Applying Social Networking to Telemedicine in Ghana

Computer-mediated communication systems can be used to bridge the gap between doctors in under-served regions with local shortages of medical expertise and medical specialists worldwide. To this end, researchers have designed a prototype remote consultation system intended to provide the social, institutional and infrastructural context for sustained, self-organizing growth of a globally-distributed Ghanaian medical community. The design draws on three key design principles: social networks as a framework on which to build incentives within a self-organizing network; optional and incremental integration with existing referral mechanisms; and, a weakly-connected, distributed architecture that allows for a highly interactive, responsive system despite failures in connectivity.  Currently, Intel Research is conducting a series of trial deployments in southern Ghana (Fall 2007) and central Ghana (Summer 2008). Lab director Eric Brewer explains why IRB does research for developing regions (video).

Common Sense

The Common Sense team is developing mobile sensing platforms to support community action and citizen service. The team is exploring new communication paradigms that empower communities to produce credible information that can be understood by non-experts in order to effect positive societal change.

Continuous Monitoring (COMO)

Presenter Gianluca Iannaccone presents the design of a predictive load shedding scheme for a network monitoring platform that supports multiple and competing traffic queries. The proposed scheme can anticipate overload situations and minimize their impact on accuracy of the traffic queries. The main novelty of this approach is that it considers queries as block boxes, with arbitrary (and highly variable) input traffic and processing cost. This system requires only a high-level specification of the utility of each query to guide the load shedding procedure and assure a fair allocation of computing resources among queries.

Diverse Secure Systems

The communications API used by most Internet applications was developed when synchronous access to remote computing resources was of primary interest. Today, Internet applications are more concerned with access to services and content. Intel researchers are developing an asynchronous API for applications operating in today’s “modern” context-oriented Internet. The API is based on the general publish/subscribe paradigm where applications express their intent for using network services as opposed to the specific actions required to obtain them. This allows application developers to free themselves from worrying about the specific time, protocol, and host to access when communicating on the Internet. These details are left to the operating system, user and system administrator.

Intel ® Mash Maker

Presenters Prashant Gandhi and Rob Ennals had a great time with their audience explaining Intel ® Mash Maker. Their call to action—don’t just browse the web, manipulate it, visualize it, repurpose it and twist it into a form that gives you the information you want, presented the way you want it. Intel ® Mash Maker is an extension to your normal web browser that allows you to “mash together” information from different sources on the web as you browse.

Mashups for the masses is not necessarily new—but wait, have you checked out widgets on your web page?  Intel ® Mash Maker is a mashup platform that allows anyone to write “widgets” that can run on top of a normal web page and enhance it in new ways. This can be anything from adding new visualizations, transforming the data or bringing in information from other sources. Think you have an idea of an interesting thing you could do with a web page? Write an Intel ® Mash Maker widget to do it.

Didn’t get to attend the Intel Research Open House and try Mash Maker? No worries!

You can sign up online for the Intel ® Mash Maker Technology Preview and enter the semantic web through the back door. 

And, if you want to hear about Intel ® Mash Maker directly from one of Intel's researchers, check out Rob Ennals on UTube.  

End Host Security (PROTEUS)

Intel researchers have developed a monitoring technique that tracks the persistence of suspicious communications and show that it successfully catches much of these covert exchanges. Additionally, they are working to reduce the false positives generated by the Host Intrusion Detection Systems in order to reduce the annoyance imposed upon users and IT operators. Using a whitelisting technique based on observing user traffic patterns, researchers are able to explain over 80% of the alarms generated. 

Rural Connectivity Platfrom

Rural Connectivity Platform (RCP) is a wireless long distance back haul solution that operates on non-licensed spectrums to provide the perfect product for emerging markets. Developed by the Intel Research Berkeley lab, the RCP is a low-cost, low-power and low- touch solution designed to bring connectivity to remote areas. Applying a TDMA modification to the MAC layer of standard 802.11, RCP is able to achieve connection distances of up to 100 km unobstructed line-of-sight. Additionally, the relay and fork modes of operation allow for more complex topologies.