Professor, Alumni Receive Award for Edge Computing Research
A Georgia Tech research team was recently recognized for an influential paper that helped define how applications could run efficiently outside the cloud.
The team received the 10-Year Test of Time Award at the 20th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2026) in July.
Professor Umakishore Ramachandran and his former Ph.D. students – Enrique Saurez, Kirak Hong, Dave Lillethun, and Beate Ottenwälder – were recognized for their 2016 paper, Incremental Deployment and Migration of Geo-distributed Situation Awareness Applications in the Fog. Saurez, now a researcher at Microsoft, was the lead author of the paper.
Most of a person’s daily internet use, such as sending emails or shopping, runs through the cloud. Cloud computing does have latency issues, but this is typically not perceptible to people. However, in situation-awareness applications, such as virtual reality or autonomous vehicles, this latency becomes a barrier.
“Cloud computing is not appropriate for these latency-sensitive applications where events occur at computational perception speeds as opposed to human perception speeds. And this is the reason that edge computing became important,” Ramachandran said.
Rather than using the cloud, edge computing brings computation closer to the data source. This method reduces latency and backhaul bandwidth consumption. Beyond latency reduction, edge computing offers other advantages over the cloud. Businesses and organizations that handle confidential data may not want to store their records in the public cloud, and edge computing offers a more secure alternative.
The awarded paper proposed a new programming model, Foglets, that enables domain experts with limited knowledge of edge computing to run their applications on the geographically distributed edge infrastructure.
“We showed that with edge compute you can actually do some of the things that you need for situation awareness applications,” Ramachandran said.
“All of these students that I worked with on this paper have graduated and moved on to industry and academia and are doing great things, so it’s a nice honor to see something we did 10 years back get recognition.”
