I am a researcher at USC Information Sciences Institute in Arlington, VA with a focus on embedded systems. I earned my PhD in the Abstract research group led by Prof. Brandon Lucia in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. My thesis developed hardware and system software support for reliable and efficient program execution on wireless and batteryless energy-harvesting devices for wearable, medical, and civil applications. Prior to the ECE program at CMU, I've earned a B.A. in Computer Science at Harvard University and worked as a software engineer at Bloomberg L.P. in New York.
A Reconfigurable Energy Storage Architecture for Energy-harvesting Devices. Alexei Colin, Emily Ruppel, Brandon Lucia. 23rd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS). March 2018. Best Paper. [paper] [source]
CleanCut: Task Decomposition of Programs for Intermittent Energy-harvesting Devices. Alexei Colin, Brandon Lucia. Compiler Construction (CC). February 2018. [paper]
Alpaca: Intermittent Execution without Checkpoints Kiwan Maeng, Alexei Colin, Brandon Lucia. Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). 2016. [paper] 2017.
An Energy-interference-free Hardware-Software Debugger for Intermittent Energy-harvesting Systems. Alexei Colin, Graham Harvey, Brandon Lucia, Alanson Sample. IEEE Micro. June 2017. [paper] [source]
Chain: Task and Channels for Reliable Intermittent Programs. Alexei Colin and Brandon Lucia. Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). 2016. [paper] [source]
An Energy-interference-free Hardware-Software Debugger for Intermittent Energy-harvesting Systems. Alexei Colin, Graham Harvey, Brandon Lucia, Alanson Sample. 21st International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS). 2016. [paper] [source]
Energy-interference-free System and Toolchain Support for Energy-harvesting Devices. Alexei Colin, Alanson Sample, Brandon Lucia. International Conference on Compilers, Architectures and Synthesis of Embedded Systems (CASES, short paper). 2015. [paper]
The Sample Stream Abstraction for Coordinated Energy-efficient Access to Peripheral Devices. Alexei Colin, Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar. Technical Report, Carnegie Mellon University. 2015. [paper]
Energy-Efficient Allocation of Real-Time Applications onto Single-ISA Heterogeneous Multi-Core Processors. Alexei Colin, Arvind Kandhalu, Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar. Journal of Signal Processing Systems (JSPS). 2015. [paper]
Energy-Efficient Allocation of Real-Time Applications onto Heterogeneous Processors. Alexei Colin, Arvind Kandhalu, Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar. IEEE 20th International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA). 2014. Best Paper [paper]
A Virtual Fence using Infra-red Break Beams
Final Project for 18-748 Wireless Sensor Networks (with Nishant Parekh)
Extending Battery Life by Controlling Load Profile
Final Project for 18-848 Networked Cyber-Physical Systems
Spacial Decomposition and Parallelization in Autosim
Final Project for 15-853 Algorithms in the Real World
Safe Ball Passing in RoboCup
Final Project for 15-424 Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems
A Model-Based Power Governor for Heterogeneous Platforms
Final Project for 18-743 Power-Aware Computing (with Milda Zizyte)
Bring Debian to the Patriot Javelin S4 NAS
Because why not.
Patch Xorg to play nicely with systemd on ARM boards
A debugging saga in the venerable Xorg code base that culminated in a patch.
I am involved with the wonderful ECE Outreach group at CMU. In my lab students build an AM radio on a breadboard and learn the basics of amplitude modulation and demodulation. In my second lab students build an battery-less audible radio wave detector and learn about energy-harvesting technology.
In Summer 2015, I conducted a lab for the Broadcom Masters program at CMU where students soldered an AM radio kit.
In Summer 2013 I led the ECE project session for Summer Academy for Math and Science (SAMS) at CMU. My two groups of six high school students got to wire a light-sensitive "smart light" circuit, build an AM radio, learn a bit of Python, code a speech recognition app, tune a control loop for a target-tracking drone, and build an Arduino-based maze-following robot.