Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Aviral Shrivastava,

Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Informatics

Aviral Shrivastava’s research focuses on developing computer architectural features that the compiler can easily use. The real-life application of this means he’s working on increasing battery life so that everyday appliances can go longer without having to be recharged.

The iPod is of special interest to Shrivastava. He’s been trying to condense its software since he was a PhD student at the University of California-Irvine working in collaboration with Intel. Battery consumption is reduced when an appliance becomes capable of running system level power policies and low power software.

“Battery has become the most important constraint, or the most important deciding factor, in the weight, size, shape and usability of electronic devices…You look at the new iPod, Shrivastava said, “It’s supposed to be for watching movies, but its run time is only two hours. You couldn’t watch “The Lord of the Rings” on it. And that’s when it is new. After a year, I think you can watch the trailer and that’s it.”

After earning his PhD in 2006, Shrivastava joined the Department of Computing and Informatics at ASU. He’s currently teaching courses in low power computer architecture. “Research and teaching are something that you cannot separate,” Shrivastava said. “The whole story is in gaining knowledge as well as disseminating knowledge. Just one of them will not do. This is the ideal profession which allows me to do that.”

Shrivastava appreciates the nice synergy of the four-person research team that he’s working with at ASU. “One person is designing the chips so that they consume low power, I’m designing the software so that it consumes low power, another person is designing this whole system for low power and the fourth is designing a battery that will have low power.”

For Shrivastava, it’s an undertaking that will take months of research and trial and error. For most everyone else, it will mean the convenience of watching “Lord of the Rings” without an intermission.