About Me:

I am a Principal Researcher and a Research Manager at Microsoft Research, leading the Sensing and Energy Research Group (SERG). My group conducts fundamental and systems research on sensing and energy-efficient computing.

My personal research interests root in understanding and managing the physical properties of computing. Examples include timing, location, energy, and the awareness of and impact on the physical world. I worked on actor-oriented modeling, simulation, & programming models, low power and networked sensing, system resource management & control, mobile context extraction & management, and novel mobile & cloud applications. My recent projects range from sensor networks, mobile computing, to data centers.

Before joining MSR in May 2004, I was a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC). Since 2008, I also hold an adjunct professorship (Foreign PhD Advisor) at Harbin Institute of Technology, China. I got my Ph.D. degree from EECS, UC Berkeley in 2001; got my Master (1996) and Bachelor (1993) degrees from Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

I am a Distinguished Scientist of ACM since 2011. I have received the Exceptional Student Award from Tsinghua University (清华大学优秀学生特等奖 -- the highest student award) in 1996, Leon O. Chua Award for outstanding research from UC Berkeley in 2001, Technology Advance Award from PARC in 2003, and Gold Star Award from Microsoft in 2008. I received, with co-authors, Best Paper Awards from RTAS 2010 and SenSys 2012.

I am an Associated Editor for ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks. From 2008 to 2011, I was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing and Simulation Journal. Recently, I have been the General Chair for CPS Week 2015, ACM SenSys 2011, and PerCom 2011, a TPC co-chair for IPSN 2014, PerCom 2012, SenSys 2009 and IPSN/SPOT 2008, and a founding co-chair for PhoneSense 2010 and a co-chair of FeBID 2009, 2013 and 2014. I served on various NSF review panels, on the TPC of conferences such as SenSys, IPSN, RTAS, RTSS, HSCC, ICDCS, DAC, and DATE, and as a reviewer for various journals.

Here is my CV.

Research Projects:

• Subjective Sensing: Personalized sensing and service delivery on mobile devices.
• New Frontiers for Location Sensing:
  • CO-GPS: Low energy and high sensitivity assisted GPS sensing with cloud offloading.
  • FM-Based Indoor Location
• Low Cost and Highly Available Data Centers
  • Data Center Genome:
    Data centers cost billions of dollars to build and consume billions of KWh every year. In this project, we aim to understand the complex physical and cyber dynamics among system load, computing, networking, and cooling through networked sensing and control. The goal is to advance the ways equipment are provisioned, loads are distributed, and systems are operated in data centers.
  • Fuel Cell Powered Data Centers
  • Virtual Machine Power Metering and Resource Management

Past projects

• SONGO: Cloud Services ON the GO
• SenseWeb: Geo-indexed realtime sensors on Local Live.
• SONGS: Service-Oriented Network of Generic Sensors
• MSR Sense: Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit
• Collaborative Sensing (CoSense) at PARC, part of DARPA SensIT program
• Ptolemy and Ptolemy II at UC Berkeley, partially supported by
  • DARPA Model-Based Integration of Embedded Software (Mobies) program
  • DARPA Software Enabled Control (SEC) program
  • DARPA Composite CAD program

Community Services:

• Associated Editor: ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks, 2012 ~
• Associated Editor: IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing, 2008~2011
• Area Editor, SIMULATION, Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International, 2004~2007
• Steering Committee Chair: SenSys 2013-2014
• General Chair/Co-chair: SenSys 2011, PerCom 2011
• TPC Chair/Co-chair: ACM/IEEE IPSN2014, IEEE PerCom 2012, ICDCS 2011 Wireless and Mobile Computing Track, SenSys 2009, IPSN 2008/SPOTS track.
• Workshop Chair/Co-Chair: PhoneSense 2010, FeBID 2009, 2013, 2014, Basenets 2006, ACM Multimedia Workshop 2006.
• Finance chair: Sensys 2008, IPSN 2009
• Demo/Poster co-chair: Sensys 2006, SECON 2007
• Technical Program Committee:
  • 2013: HSCC, WEED, SenSys
  • 2012: Feedback Computing, WEED, PhoneSense
  • 2011: IPSN, ICDCS
  • 2010: IPSN, RTSS, MobiCom posters, WEED
  • 2009: SenSys, ICDCS, DATE, FeBID, Pervasive demos, WEED 
  • 2008: IPSN/SPOTS, ICDCS,
  • 2007: SenSys, RTSS, ChinaCom
  • 2006: IPSN, Basenets, ICDCS 

Awards:

• MobiSys'14 Best Paper Award: Shahriar Nirjon, Jie Liu, Gerald DeJean, Bodhi Priyantha, Yuzhe Jin, and Ted Hart, “COIN-GPS: Indoor Localization from Direct GPS Receiving”

• SenSys'12 Best Paper Award: Jie Liu, Bodhi Priyantha, Ted Hart, Heitor Ramos, Antonio Loureiro, Qiang Wang, “Energy Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading”

• SenSys'11 Best Demo Award: Xiaofan Jiang, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Feng Zhao,
  Kaifei Chen, Jeff Hsu, Ben Zhang, and Jie Liu, "Creating Interactive Virtual Zones in Physical Space with Magnetic-Induction"

• RTAS'10 Best Paper Award: Qing Cao, Dong Wang, Tarek Abdelzaher, Bodhi Priyantha, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, "Energy-optimal Batching Periods for Asynchronous Multistage Data Processing on Sensor Nodes: Foundations and an mPlatform Case Study"
• Microsoft Gold Star Award, 2008
• PARC Technology Advance Award, 2003 
• UC Berkeley Leon O. Chua Award for outstanding research, 2001
• UC Berkeley Regents Fellowship, 1996
• Tsinghua University Exceptional Student Award (清华大学优秀学生特等奖), 1996
• Numerous student awards from Tsinghua University, including Siemens Fellowship, President Nanxiang Jiang Award, "Dec. 9th" Memorial Award, etc.  1988-1996 

Selected Recent Presentations:

• RTSS'13 Keynote: Taming the Energy Hog in Cloud Infrastructure
• SenSys'12: Energy Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading
• PhoneSense'12 Keynote: Subjective Phones: Mobile Experiences Just For You!
• The 2012 UIUC Symposium on Emerging Topics in Control and Modeling: Networked Systems: Discovering the Genome of Data Center
• 2012 IEEE Technology Time Machine: Cyber-Physical Systems... Who Cares?

• Ana Carolina Riekstin, Sean James, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, and Eric Peterson, No More Electrical Infrastructure: Towards Fuel Cell Powered Data Centers, in 2013 Workshop on Power-Aware Computing and Systems , ACM, November 2013
• jie liu, Bodhi Priyantha, Ted Hart, Heitor Ramos, Antonio A.F. Loureiro, and Qiang Wang, Energy Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading, in 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2012), ACM, November 2012
• Moo-Ryong Ra, Bodhi Priyantha, Aman Kansal, and Jie Liu, Improving Energy Efficiency of Personal Sensing Applications with Heterogeneous Multi-Processors, in The 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012), ACM, 5 September 2012
• Yin Chen, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Jie Liu, and Bodhi Priyantha, FM-based Indoor Localization, ACM International Conference in Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), 25 June 2012
• Tingxin Yan, David Chu, Deepak Ganesan, Aman Kansal, and Jie Liu, Fast App Launching for Mobile Devices Using Predictive User Context, in ACM MobiSys, ACM, 25 June 2012
• Sriram Govindan, Jie Liu, Aman Kansal, and Anand Sivasubramaniam, Cuanta: Quantifying Effects of Shared On-chip Resource Interference for Consolidated Virtual Machines, in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), ACM, 27 October 2011
• Harold Lim, Aman Kansal, and Jie Liu, Power Budgeting for Virtualized Data Centers, in 2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '11), USENIX, 15 June 2011
• Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Sean James, Christian Belady, Jiakang Lu, and Kamin Whitehouse, The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing, in 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, USENIX, June 2011
• David Chu, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, Mobile Apps: It’s Time to Move Up to CondOS, in 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XIII), USENIX, 9 May 2011
• Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Dimitrios Lymberpoulos, Karin Strauss, Jie Liu, and Doug Burger, Pocket Cloudlets, in ASPLOS 2011 (International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ACM, March 2011
• Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha, Jie Liu, and Andreas Terzis, Surviving Wi-Fi Interference in Low Power ZigBee Networks, in Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2010), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2 November 2010
• Jie Liu, Automatic Server to Circuit Mapping with The Red Pills, in 2010 Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems (HotPower '10), USENIX, 3 October 2010
• Aman Kansal, Feng Zhao, Jie Liu, Nupur Kothari, and Arka Bhattacharya, Virtual Machine Power Metering and Provisioning , in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 10 June 2010
• Abdullah Mueen, Suman Nath, and Jie Liu, Fast Approximate Correlation for Massive Time-series Data, in SIGMOD '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2010
• Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Jie Liu, Liqian Luo, Andreas Terzis, and Feng Zhao, RACNet: A High-Fidelity Data Center Sensing Network, in Proceedings of The 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2009
• Galen Reeves, Jie Liu, Suman Nath, and Feng Zhao, Managing Massive Time Series Streams with Multi-Scale Compressed Trickles, in VLDB '2009: Proceedings of 35th Conference on Very Large Data Bases , Very Large Data Bases Endowment Inc., August 2009
• Gong Chen, Wenbo He, Jie Liu, Suman Nath, Leonidas Rigas, Lin Xiao, and Feng Zhao, Energy-aware server provisioning and load dispatching for connection-intensive internet services, in NSDI'08: Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2008
• Aman Kansal, Suman Nath, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing, in IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 8–13, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, October 2007
• Yang Zhao, Jie Liu, and Edward A. Lee, A Programming Model for Time-Synchronized Distributed Real-Time Systems, in 13th IEEE Real Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2007), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., April 2007
• Siddharth Seth, Alec Woo, Tim Olson, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao, A spreadsheet toolkit for streaming sensor data, in Embedded networked sensor systems, January 2005

Here is my full publication list.

Sensing and Energy Research Group

Upcoming Conf. Chairing

• Cyber-Physical Systems Week 2015

Publications

• Selected List
• Full List

Teaching

• Winter 2008, Univ. of Washington CSE590K: Analysis and Control of Computing Systems Using Linear Discrete-Time System Theory

News/Blog Coverage

• New York Times: Turn On the Server. It’s Cold Inside.
• Popsci.com: Steamy Cloud Servers Installed In Homes and Businesses Could Be Used As Furnaces
• Slashdot: Why Waste Servers' Heat?
• ITNews: Microsoft eyes cloud waste for home heating
• Green Data Center Blog: Microsoft Research Paper, Measuring Energy use of a Virtual Machine
• Gigaom: Microsoft Joulemeter: Using Software to Green the Data Center
• MIT Technology Review: Saving Energy in Data Centers
• Popular science (Popsci.com): Microsoft Practices Sensor-ship
• KOMO4 News: Microsoft Research: From cells to solar system
• IDG News (appeared on PC World, Computer World, etc.): Microsoft shows off Data-center Monitoring System
• New Scientist: Delaying data could cut net's carbon footprint.

Past Intern Students

I had the privilege to work with the following bright intern students in the past several years:

• Elaine Cheong ('02, '04, UC Berkeley)
• Judy Liebman ('02, EECS, UC Berkeley)
• Qing Fang ('03, CS, Stanford)
• Xue Yang ('03, ECE, UIUC)
• Jason Bayer ('03, EECS, UC Berkeley)
• Kamin Whitehouse ('04, CS, UC Berkeley)
• Prabal Dutta ('04, CS, UC Berkeley)
• Zoe Abrams ('05, CS, Stanford)
• Ryan Newton ('05, CSAIL, MIT)
• Andre Santanche ('06, CS, Univ. of San Paulo, UNICAMP, Brazil)
• Slobodan Matic ('06, EECS, UC Berkeley)
• David Chu ('06, CS, UC Berkeley)
• Simon Han ('06, CS, UCLA)
• Borje Karlsson ('07, CS, PUC-Rio, Brazil)
• Wenbo He ('07, CS, UIUC)
• Gong Chen ('07, Stat, UCLA)
• John Calandrino ('07, CS, UNC)
• Mike Liang ('08, CS, JHU)
• Lakshmi Ganesh ('08, CS, Cornell)
• Galen Reeves ('08, EECS, UC Berkeley)
• Sriram Govindan ('09, PennState)
• Lei Li ('09, CMU)
• Heitor Rumas ('10 Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
• Hong Lu ('10 Dartmouth) 
• Aveek Purohit ('10 CMU)
• Negin Salajegheh ('11 UMass)
• Yin Chen ('11 JHU)
• Moo-Ryong Ra ('11 USC)
• Amanda de Paula ('12 Univ. of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
• Di Wang ('12 Penn State)
• Justin Lu ('12 UMass Amherst)
• Woosuk Lee('12 Purdue)
• Abu Sayeed Saifullah ('12 Washington Univ. at St. Louis)
• Ana Carolina Riekstin ('13 Univ. of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
• Azalia Mirhoseini ('13 Rice)
• Shahriar Nirjon ('13 Univ. of Virginia)
• Alexandra Vtyurina ('13 Southern Federal Univ., Russia)
• Di Wang ('13 Penn State)
• Yixin Luo ('13 CMU)
• Scott Wisdom ('14 UW)
• Anna Tostes ('14 UFMG, Brazil)
• Yang Li ('14 CMU)