Jamey Hicks

Background

I joined Nokia Research Center in September 2005 to lead Nokia Research Center Cambridge and the Nokia MIT Collaboration.

Prior to joining Nokia, I worked as a researcher at the Cambridge Research Laboratory as part of Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq Computer Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard Company. With the Alpha microprocessor team, I worked on performance profiling, microarchitecture for simultaneous multithreading, and on ProfileMe!, an architecture for statistical performance measurement at the instruction level of production code.

I was one of the founding members of handhelds.org and ported the first bootloader and kernel to the Compaq iPAQ handheld computer. We started handhelds.org in order to build a highly modifiable and highly stable platform for mobility research, but it grew into a fairly large open source effort with commercial users and support. Some of the software components developed on the iPAQ as part of the handhelds.org project have been incorporated into Maemo for the N770 tablet.

As part of our mobility research, my group and I explored personal servers, IPV6 mobility, SIP VOIP, instant messaging and presence, 802.11 location tracking, SIP location-based services, internet protocol over 802.15.4, and featherweight communication devices. Featherweight devices weigh less than 50 grams and have months or years of battery life. We used sensor network software stacks and hardware components to achieve that, while using standard internet protocols (DHCP, NTP, HTTP, SIP, IMAP) in order to deliver person-to-person communication solutions for mobile and nomadic users.

The charter for NRCC is to bring new ideas into Nokia, but ultimately we will be measured on how we affect Nokia products. NRCC is the focal point for the collaboration between Nokia and MIT as one way of bringing in new ideas. NRCC will also be collaborating with Nokia engineering and business units in order to effect technology transfer.
One of the lessons I learned at CRL is how much the mechanical, hardware, and software designs affect the whole user experience. In all of my projects at CRL, we had very close interactions between multiple layers of system design, allowing us to optimize each layer in order to deliver a much better total solution. One of my goals at Nokia Research Center Cambridge is to incorporate that kind of cross-layer collaboration on a day-to-day basis.

Professional Activities

• USENIX Association since 2004.
• Internet2 Presence Integrated Communication Working Group since 2003.
• Handhelds.org, co-founder and co-leader since 2000.
• Association for Computing Machines since 1988.

Patents & Patents Pending

18 patents issued:

U. S. Patent 5,809,450:

G. Z. Chrysos, J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Method for estimating statistics of properties of instructions processed by a processor pipeline. Issued September 15, 1998.

U. S. Patent 5,923,872:

G. Z. Chrysos, J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Apparatus for sampling instruction operand or result values in a processor pipeline. Issued July 13, 1999.

U. S. Patent 5,964,867:

J. M. Anderson, J. A. Dean, James E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Method for inserting memory prefetch operations based on measured latencies in a program optimizer. Issued October 12, 1999.

U. S. Patent 6,000,044:

G. Z. Chrysos, J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, D. L. Leibholz, E. J. McLellan, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Apparatus for randomly sampling instructions in a processor pipeline. Issued December 7, 1999.

U. S. Patent 6,070,009:

J. A. Dean, R. A. Eustace, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Method for estimating execution rates of program execution paths. Issued May 30, 2000.

U. S. Patent 6,092,180:

J. M Anderson, J. A. Dean, James E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, W. E. Weihl. Method for measuring latencies by randomly sampling instructions while the instructions are executed. Issued July 18, 2000.

U. S. Patent 6,119,075:

J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, Stephen C. Root, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Method for estimating statistics of properties of interactions among instructions processed by a processor pipeline. Issued September 12, 2000.

U. S. Patent 6,148,396:

G. Z. Chrysos, J. A. Dean, R. A. Eustace, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Apparatus for sampling path history in a processor pipeline. Issued November 14, 2000.

U. S. Patent 6,163,840:

G. Z. Chrysos, Jeffrey Dean, J. E. Hicks, D. L. Leibholz, E. J. McLellan, C. A. Waldspurger, W. E. Weihl. Method and apparatus for sampling multiple potentially concurrent instructions in a processor pipeline. Issued December 19, 2000.

U. S. Patent 6,175,814:

G. Z. Chrysos, Jeffrey Dean, J. E. Hicks Jr., C. A. Waldspurger, W. E. Weihl. Apparatus for determinining the instantaneous average number of instructions processed. Issued January 16, 2001.

U. S. Patent 6,195,748:

G. Z. Chrysos, Jeffrey Dean, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, W. E. Weihl, D. L. Leibholz, E. J. McLellan. Apparatus for sampling instruction execution information in a processor pipeline. Issued February 27, 2001.

U. S. Patent 6,202,127:

J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks Jr., C. A. Waldspurger, W. E. Weihl. Apparatus for spatial and temporal sampling in a computer memory system. Issued March 13, 2001.

U. S. Patent 6,237,073:

Jeffrey Dean, J. E. Hicks, W. E. Weihl. Method for providing virtual memory to physical memory page mapping in a computer system that randomly samples state information. Issued May 22, 2001.

U. S. Patent 6,332,178:

J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl Method for estimating statistics of properties of memory system transactions. Issued December 18, 2001.

U. S. Patent 6,374,367:

J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, George Z. Chrysos, C. A. Waldspurger, and W. E. Weihl. Apparatus and method for monitoring a computer system to guide optimization. Application filed November 1997. Issued April 16, 2002.

U. S. Patent 6,493,741:

J. S. Emer, R. L. Stamm, B. E. Edwards, M. H. Reilly, C. B. Zilles, T. Fossum, C. F. Joerg, and J. E. Hicks. Method and apparatus to quiesce a portion of a simultaneous multithreaded central processing unit. Issued December 10, 2002.

U. S. Patent 6,549,930:

G. Z. Chrysos, J. A. Dean, J. E. Hicks, C. A. Waldspurger and W. E. Weihl. Method for scheduling threads in a multithreaded processor. Issued April 15, 2003.

U. S. Patent 6,675,192:

J. S. Emer, R. L. Stamm, B. E. Edwards, M. H. Reilly, C. B. Zilles, T. Fossum, C. F. Joerg, J. E. Hicks. Temporary halting of thread execution until monitoring of armed events to memory location identified in working registers. Issued January 6, 2004.

Software

• Co-founder of handhelds.org, prior kernel maintainer for iPAQ Linux.
• SIP Express Router: maintainer of presence agent 2003-2005. Updated SIMPLE support and integrated automatic location tracking.
• Speex voice codec: ported to TI C5x DSP and Analog Devices Blackfin DSP.

Publications

Arvind and J. Hicks

A Mobile Phone Ecosystem: MIT and Nokia's Joint Research Venture. In IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol 21, Issue 5, Sept-Oct 2006.

A. Christian, B. Avery, S. Ayer, F. Bomba, J. E. Hicks.

"HPL-2005-113 SNAP Computing: Wireless Location-based Plug and Play". HP Labs Tech Report. June 2005.

A. Christian, J. E. Hicks, B. Avery, B. Kuris, D. Denning, S. Ayer, J. Ankcorn.

"HPL-2005-114 Fingertips of the Network: Featherweight Communicators and Sensors". HP Labs Tech Report. June 2005.

J. E. Hicks, A. Christian, B. Avery.

"HPL-2005-115 Integrating Presence and Location Services using SIP". HP Labs Tech Report. June 2005.

B. Lyon, J. E. Hicks, B. Haley, Y. Pouffary.

"3G Internet Mobility". International Engineering Consortium.

U. Kremer, J. E. Hicks and J. Rehg.

"A Compilation Framework for Power and Energy Management on Mobile Computers". Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Parallel Computing (LCPC'01). August 2001.

U. Kremer, J. E. Hicks and J. Rehg.

"Compiler-Directed Remote Task Execution for Power Management". Workshop on Compilers and Operating Systems for Low Power (COLP'00). October 2000.

J. Dean, Hicks, J. E., C. A. Waldspurger, W. E. Weihl, and G. Chrysos .

"Profileme: Hardware support for instruction-level profiling on out-of-order processors". 30th Symposium on Microarchitecture (Micro-30). December 1997.

D. Chiou, B. S. Ang, Arvind, M. J. Beckerle, A. Boughton, R. Greiner, J. E. Hicks, and J. C. Hoe.

"StarT-NG: Delivering Seamless Parallel Computing". Proceedings of EURO-PAR'95. 1995.

S. Aditya, C. Flood and J. Hicks.

"Garbage Collection for Strongly-Typed Languages using Run-time Type Reconstruction". Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming. June 1994.

B. K. Szymanski, J. Hicks, R. Jagannathan, V. Sarkar, D. B. Skillicorn, R. B. Yates.

"Is There a Future for Functional Languages on Parallel Processors?". International Conference on Computer Languages. 1994.

J. Hicks, ed., and M. J. Beckerle, R. Greiner, H. Thompson, D. Chiou, B. S. Ang, G. A. Boughton, A. Dahbura, and V. Natarajan.

"StarT Architecture White Paper". 1994.

D. Chiou, B. S. Ang, Arvind, M. J. Beckerle, A. Boughton, R. Greiner, J. E. Hicks, and J. C. Hoe.

"StarT-NG: Delivering Seamless Parallel Computing". Proceedings of EURO-PAR'95. 1995.

J. E. Hicks, D. Chiou, B. S. Ang, and Arvind.

"Performance Studies of Id on the Monsoon Dataflow System". Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 1993.

J. E. Hicks.

"Experiences with Compiler-Directed Storage Reclamation". Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture. 1993.

J. E. Hicks.

MIT/LCS TR-555, Compiler Directed Storage Reclamation using Object Lifetime Analysis . MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge MA. 1992.

K. R. Traub, G. M. Papadopoulos, M. J. Beckerle, J. E. Hicks, and J. Young.

"Overview of the Monsoon Project". Proceedings of the 1991 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design. 1991.

Research Interests

List ending not yet defined, but beginning with:

• pervasive computing
• ultra-low power system design
• presence/context integrated communication
• computer architecture
• wireless communication