UT ECE professor Vijay Janapa Reddi has been awarded a competitive Google Research Award with the initiative of achieving High Performance and Energy Efficient Mobile Web Browsing.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that there will be more mobile devices than humans on the planet, and that web surfing with mobile devices will surpass browsing with desktop environments. As users increasingly rely on mobile web browsing technology, they will inevitably demand the same level of user experience as on traditional desktop environments. Unfortunately, mobile devices are short on computing power and they are constrained by battery and power dissipation. These constraints emphasize the necessity to explore research ideas that overcome the problems.

The Google award recognizes the work that Dr. Janapa Reddi and his team are conducting on novel hardware and software techniques to improve the performance and energy-consumption of web browsers on mobile devices. By combining computer architectural mechanisms with machine learning kernels and webpage characteristics, the team is developing new intelligence into web browsers. Future web browsers will automatically dial-in their hardware resource requirements based on client-side end-user experience in order to achieve a balance between performance and energy consumption. Such smarts are an almost absolute necessity in developing third-world countries where energy is still a scarce resource and the mobile web is rapidly growing.