Intel's Embedded and Comms University Program

One of my jobs at Intel is to be the director of the Intel's Embedded and Communications University Program. It's not a big job. I only spend an average of an hour or so per week on it. Most of that time coming in two big bursts: when we run our annual conference and our annual call for proposals. There is a third major activity, the Intel Cup which doesn't require much of our time becuase it has its own team. Still, despite the low amount of effort required on my part, this position gives me some interesting perspective.

The annual conference gives us a good chance to interact with the researchers. We try to balance the agenda so that we have about 50% presentations from Intel employees (to let the researchers know what problems we are working on and would find interesting to have help on) and 50% from the academic community (so that they can present their work and ideas back to us). The face-to-face connections we make at that conference are invaluable.

The call for proposals allows us to hand out money. This reminds me of one of current corporate mottoes: It's not just what we make; it's what we make possible. Many of the grants allow us to seed uses of our chips in ways that have never been attempted. The researchers build lots of things that Intel would and should never build. Giving them money and hardware can make that possible.

Of course, we also give grants for things that we are working on. For example, my area of expertise is regular expressions. There we have handed out several grants to help design optimized hardware to solve that problem. Not only did we get access to that research, it also helped us hire top notch interns. One in particular, Michela Becchi from Washington University in St Louis, has done very good and innovative work that I was proud to sponsor. Hopefully, when she becomes a professor, we will get the opportunity to fund her and her students.

That brings me to what prompted me to write about this, GENI modems and routers. This looks like a very promising coming wave. And, one where Intel clearly is making a mark. Not only are we sponsoring research in that direction, but some of Intel's chips are clear choices for modems and routers at the next level of complexity. The advantage of the ubiquitous Intel architecture also helps build them easier. You can leverage the existing free software community and all that work that has been done for PCs to get added functionality. A win-win situation.

The next area of research that is very interesting is low-power research. The atom processor has made a whole new range of devices that Intel can serve. Moreover, many of them need to run in environments where they need to run on batteries, solar power, or scavenged power. The last area being particularly interesting and difficult. Many of the researchers we are funding in this area are building something that Intel itself will never commercialize, and some of them are combining atom with "motes" very small sensors that are beyond Moore's law for Intel to build today.

At a more commercial level, we also have numerous in-vehicle projects that we have sponsored. If your next car is safer, it may just be because of research we sponsored. If it has a better audio-video system, we may have had a hand in that too.

As a worker in the security field I would be remiss not to mention that we also sponsor work in that area. As Intel drives the world to have 15 billion embedded and connected devices, we need safe networks and secure computers. We have a projects that we sponsor to help make that happen. We also have internal projects. Some of those will make it out the door and result in better and more reliable devices for you. (Unfortunately, some won't too, which is why we can't talk about them. Don't promise something you may never be able to deliver.)

The last thing I want to mention is the Intel Cup. This has been a very successful third-leg of our tripod. It started as a project to fund embedded work in Chinese universities. However, it has grown to a more international competition, with schools around the world participating. Like our research grants, we supply hardware for building an embedded solution, but we don't place undue constraints on what the participants can build. We want innovative new ideas.

I'm sure many of you would like links to follow up on this. I will add them soon. I have to go ask the people who track that stuff what they are, and before that I need to focus on getting what I'm suppose to be innovating on one step closer to in your hands....

Signal and Noise -- what to tweet

So, like many people creating and following content, the issue of creating signal and not noise is important to me. It requires finesse and subtlety.

As part of my job at Intel, I encouraged to tweet these days, as a form of micro-blogging. For an introvert like me, at first it seemed very unnatural. Reminding me of "winking" that one does on dating sites, which has its places but is hard for carrying on "technical conversations". However, I see that tweets can serve as pointers to longer content and that makes much more sense. Short pointers to longer topics. Note quite the same as bookmarks, since many of these pointers are about timely rather than timeless info. Still, I'm beginning to warm to it. It will take me a while to get the exact level I want.

It doesn't make sense to turn ones twitter account into an unedited newsfeed. If someone wants the latest headlines, there are many places for that. So, as a good twit (I'm sure that not other twitter users call themselves, but it seem right, and I can honor an old friend David Hornbaker with that term.) I will try to be selective in what links I post.

Now, I'm certain other people have thought through these issues and have better formulated the issue and the resolutions than I have (or even than I could). I'm not sure how to find such fonts of wisdom though, and perhaps that is part of this whole revo-evolution. The democraticization of content has made relevant content harder to find. (Relevant quote from some cartoonist in the Iraq-search-for-WMD-days showed two CIA agents sifting through boxes of dots. Caption:
"We haven't been able to connect the dots. Solution, we need more dots.")

Finall, the point I've been heading with all of this. I started a twibe on compilers. That's one of my areas of specialty. It will be interesting to see how many other compiler writers join the twibe (or even tweet at all). One of the things I've been considering tweeting is links to good articles in the newsgroup comp.compilers. It's not like the newsgroup isn't high S/N today. It is. Our moderator John Levine does an excellent job of having just the right light touch. However, I do suspect that there are people who are writing compilers (or compiler like things) that haven't found that newsgroup. If I can help them find that resource and at the same time offer a secondary level of filtering, then that will be good. That brings me back to the point, when I tweet out links to comp.compilers they will be selective links--otherwise I'm just generating noise.

Chris and Blaze -- about the picture

So, I've tried to use a consistent picture everywhere to identify me. Picking a unique picture to do that wasn't hard--it's the only picture of myself I have--in fact, it is the only picture of any kind I have on my computer. More on that later.

It isn't completely recent, ca. 2000. However, I'm not aging that fast at the moment either. Definitely heavier and a little less thatch on top, but not enough to post a bald picture, yet, 5-10 years maybe before that. Moreover, the point of the picture is to give more of an emotional take on me than a physically accurate one. I think this picture capture some of what I am.

However, to be totally candid and not misleading, I'm not into dogs, well not dogs for me. I'm perfectly happy to be friendly to other people's dogs. The dog in this picture used to belong to my [now ex-]wife(*). She was a very special dog named Blaze. This is probably one of the last shots with her healthy. She died the summer after this picture was taken. Even when this picture was taken, we knew something was wrong with Blazie. And, in that sense this picture is emotionally authentic. This dog was hers, she chose it, etc. However, I did love her though and I treated her lovingly and kindly. That's the aspect of me I'd like to have come out, that I'm generally a nice guy--not perfectly nice, but generally so.

If you catch the other side, that I'm not generally what people think I am and I don't disabuse people of their illusions, well then you're perceptive. That's all part of the package. I think people need to find their own truth. It would be arrogant of me to try to correct people's misimpressions without being asked. Even if asked, I'm simply going to help you understand what you believe and to see any inconsistencies and places where your views seem to run counter to others' perceptions. I don't have any special access to the truth, just my own set of assumptions and experiences.

As I said, this is the only picture I have. I'm not a big fan of pictures. I don't take them. I don't have them. I don't keep them. etc. My wife has a photo album on a flash drive with pictures of me, her, our daughter, our dogs, our travels, our relatives, our friends, our home etc. in various combinations. If you really want a picture of me or us, ask her. There are probably a couple of more pictures I could have that represent memories, but the number is limited. More importantly, there are so many more pictures that don't represent memories and I'm not interested in those. Likewise, the few things in my life that are important to remember I don't need pictures for. Of course, on numerous occassions people have given me cameras, vcrs, etc. I guess that's poetic justice. Hopefully, no one will invent a new must-have camera in the next few years.

From this you probably have me as very unsentimental, which at some level is true. However, I'm not unemotional. One of my favorite movie genres is the romantic comedy, e.g. the Wedding Date, and musical forms is the love song, e.g. 3 Times a Lady. It's just that my emotions are more intangible. I'm more interested in the image that provokes the emotion than the reality.

*) Here you can see my pedantic side, which isn't strong, but is there in the sense that I often try to be precise in what I say, which is actually rather comical and foolish because I have a terrible memory and often mix up facts. The brackets are important. At the time, the picture was taken, Blaze's "Mom" was still my wife, but now she is my ex-wife. That fact may not be important to anyone but me.

Well, if you got this far, thank you. Hopefully, you have a image of the person in the picture. Probably, not yet. Such is life.