Lucia Awarded PLDI 2025 Most Influential Paper Award

Brandon Lucia was awarded the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) Most Influential Paper Award for his paper A Simpler, Safer Programming and Execution Model for Intermittent Systems.

Lucia, professor of electrical and computer engineering, was presented with the award on June 19 at the 46th Association for Computing Machinery's SIGPLAN PLDI conference in South Korea. Awarded to authors who presented at PLDI 10 years prior to the current award year, papers are evaluated on their influence and impact during the past decade.

“This paper was the first to define ‘intermittent computing,’” Lucia said. “It is a real honor to see the work that my Ph.D. students and I did to pioneer intermittent computing and batteryless systems recognized with this award.”

Lucia’s paper, which he co-authored with Benjamin Ransford, an engineer at Stripe who previously worked as a postdoc at the University of Washington, introduces a novel programming and execution model, Death Is Not an Option (DINO). DINO is a first-of-its-kind model that ensures the continuous function of energy-harvesting devices despite their frequent power failures.

Energy harvesting is the process of capturing energy from the environment, often in the form of sunlight or heat, and converting it to usable electrical energy. This process allows for devices to function without batteries, but because they operate intermittently, unpredictable power failures can lead to interruptions in device execution at any time.

Fortunately, DINO allows applications to run correctly, ensuring that energy-harvesting devices function even in the event of a power loss. The model accomplishes this by tracking volatile, which stores data temporarily, and nonvolatile states that retain data when power is lost. Unlike previous models, DINO maintains consistency between these two memory states, ensuring that in the event of a power failure, a device will retain its progress from a half-completed task.

With DINO, the programming of intermittently powered devices is simplified by reducing the risk associated with potential power failures. 

“The DINO work laid the foundations for the field of intermittent computing,” Lucia said. “It also helped our team to identify fundamental inefficiencies in how processors are built that stand in the way of making batteryless and energy-constrained devices more capable.” 

The team’s paper “started a chain of research discoveries,” leading to the formation of a startup company, Efficient Computer, which is in the process of commercializing “energy efficient general purpose processors that could be used for intermittent computing,” Lucia said.

PLDI is a top conference for programming languages and systems research. It features topics related to design, implementation, theory, applications, and performance.