My First Peer Reviewed Research Paper

So the story goes like this…

I came back to ASU from Stone Ridge Technology with an incredible summer internship working on state-of-the-art FPGA RTL designs. Everyone working in this small start-up had a research mindset. This was intellectually very satisfying for me. Then, I met two more incredible folks: Prof. Martin Reisslein and Prof. Umit Ogras. They both helped me in unique ways to look at the research. I took Martin’s class in which he reinforced the need for surveying prior art. Umit joined ASU in Fall 2013 as an assistant professor. Frequent interactions with him made me very excited about exploring power management techniques in smartphones. Since the foundation of the power management techniques are power and performance models, we started exploring these models. In particular, we found a generalized form of Amdhal’s law. We got the idea for the performance model from a seminal paper from Hill and Marty on “Amdahl’s Law in the Multicore Era”. This gave the very first lesson about research. If we write a paper that is well thought out and easy to read, it will lead to more research ideas for everyone. We wrote the performance model and then my initial thought was to only publish the performance model that could be used for heterogeneous systems. However, Umit insisted that only the performance model was not sufficient for a good publication (rightly so!). This is because we need more mature ideas that not only show new models but also how they are useful.

“All models are wrong; some models are useful.” - George E. P. Box

Therefore, we also came up with a general power model and used both the power and performance models to perform the energy minimization with timing and temperature constraints. Energy optimization is a very important problem for mobile platforms that help in longer battery life and better user experience. After writing everything down with an illustrative example to convey our approach in detail, we submitted the paper to IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. The Journal was quick in responding back with a major revision. Then, we wrote a very detailed rebuttal incorporating all the reviewer’s suggestions. This provided me with the experience to reply and understand reviewer’s comments. For someone who is starting a research career, some reviewer comments may look cold and harsh. However, after writing several papers and peer reviews myself now, I believe all reviewer comments are useful. If the comment does not appear immediately useful, we should sleep over it and think how to make our paper better by using the reviewer comment. Overall, working on the first paper was very rewarding for me.