The Web is continuously transforming society---shaping communications, catalyzing innovations, even shaping thought processes. Over the past two decades, the role of the Web has shifted from information retrieval (Web 1.0) to providing a platform for interactive and engaging user experiences (Web 2.0). The Web is once again entering a new age, transcending user engagement to provide intelligent services that integrate multiple devices together (Web 3.0). The key driving force behind the Web's evolution is the ubiquity of mobile/embedded devices---undoubtedly today's most pervasive personal computing platform. The major challenge is mobile and embedded devices’ tight battery budget and performance constraints, which severely limits the sustained performance and operation time of the devices that are running the mobile web stack, and as a direct result, functionality can become severely limited.
Watt Wise Web
1990
HTML
The inception of world wide web.
1996
JAVASCRIPT
For the first time the Web became dynamic.
2008
SMARTPHONE
Mobile Web takes control as mobile devices surged.
2012
RESPONSIVENESS
Responsiveness became the first-class design consideration of mobile Web.
2016
WATT-WISE WEB
Energy-efficiency became the key to the success of mobile Web
2019
WEB OF THINGS
We are in the era when the Web is no longer only about software, it has entered the era of "Things."
Our research mission is to build an energy-efficient and high-performance web computing substrate, which spans across the hardware and software layers. At the hardware layer, we are interested in architectural support to improve the performance of web technologies in the face of severe energy constraints. At the software layer, we are interested in building intelligent runtimes and programming languages that can enable the web computations to be more easily expressed and computed upon for both ease of programmability and efficiency.