Successful internship for ARM-ECS student leads to conference paper

Charlie Leech, one of the ARM-ECS Centre’s PhD students, has successfully completed a three month internship at ARM Research, Cambridge. Charlie’s internship was funded by a competitively awarded HiPEAC Collaboration grant, which allowed him to be based at ARM from September to December 2016.

The project was in the field of compute-intensive machine learning algorithms running on ARM microcontrollers. Charlie’s work involved analysing the performance and memory requirements of machine learning algorithms applied to a “SmartRoom/SmartBuilding” IoT application – specifically, using a single PIR sensor connected to an ARM mbed platform to collect room occupancy data and predict the number of people in the room.

The internship allowed Charlie to understand the culture of an advanced technology company research environment, e.g. working closely with his industrial supervisor, attending research group meetings and using proprietary development tools. The tangible progress made in the three months, including generation of validated data, will allow ARM to make an informed decision on how to further progress this work

Experimental setup used

Another positive outcome of the internship was the acceptance of a paper at the IEEE Sensors Application Symposium (SAS 2017) to be held in March in New Jersey, USA. Charlie will present the results of this work, co-authored by Emre Ozer and Yordan Raykov of ARM.