Computing is on the brink of a new immersive era. Recent innovations in virtual/augmented/mixed reality (extended reality or XR) show the potential for a new immersive modality of computing that will transform most human activities and change how we design, program, and use computers. There is, however, an orders of magnitude gap between the power/performance/quality-of-experience (QoE) attributes of current and desirable immersive systems. Bridging this gap requires an ambitious systems research agenda that is end-to-end QoE driven, is based on hardware-software-algorithm co-design, and spans the end-user device, edge, and cloud. To enable this agenda, my group has built ILLIXR (Illinois eXtended Reality testbed), an open source XR system and testbed for end-to-end immersive systems research. I will describe ILLIXR and the research it has enabled across the computing stack. I will also discuss the industry supported ILLIXR consortium launched to democratize XR systems research, development, and benchmarking, and the Center for Immersive Computing at Illinois spanning immersive hardware to applications research and education.
Bio: Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she directs the Center for Immersive Computing. Her research interests span the system stack, ranging from hardware to applications. Her work on the data-race-free, Java, and C++ memory models forms the foundation for memory models used in most hardware and software systems today. Recently, her group released ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality testbed), an open-source extended reality system and research testbed, and launched the ILLIXR consortium to democratize XR research, development, and benchmarking. She is also known for her work on heterogeneous systems and software-driven approaches for hardware resiliency. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award. As ACM SIGARCH chair, she co-founded the CARES movement, winner of the CRA distinguished service award, to address discrimination and harassment in Computer Science research events. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering