About Me

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I am currently a Research Software Engineer at Amazon working on the DashCart, a smart cart for physical retail. Before my curent role, I worked at an early-stage stealth autonomous-vehicle startup spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining industry, I obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar, and a B.Tech in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Cyber-Physical Systems and Edge Computing. My Ph.D. thesis focuses on using synchronized clocks with the added notion of "Quality of Time" for enabling spatio-temporal coordination in cyber-physical systems at geo-distributed scale. We have developed a framework which allows cyber-physical coordination to occur over geo-distributed endpoints ranging from low-power embedded devices, to the edge and the cloud. A video demonstrating a prototype distributed multi-robot coordination application, developed using our framework can be found here.

I enjoy proving theoretical results and have also done some work on the design and analysis of energy and thermal-aware scheduling techniques for real-time systems utilizing multi-core processors and hardware accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs.

During the course of my Ph.D. I have been fortunate to be a part of the NSF CPS Frontiers Roseline project.

As part of my research experience, I have had the privelege of interning at Microsoft Research, Nutanix, Siemens Corporate Technology, Qualcomm and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Publications

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Conferences & Workshops

1. Sandeep D’souza, Victor Bahl, Lixiang Ao and Landon P. Cox
   Amadeus: Scalable, Privacy-Preserving Live Video Analytics
   under review
2. Sandeep D’souza, Heiko Koehler, Akhilesh Joshi and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
   Quartz: Time-as-a-Service for Coordination in Geo-Distributed Systems
   In ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), 2019 [ Paper ]
3. Sandeep D’souza and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
   A Cyber-Physical OS for Enabling Spatio-Temporal Coordination at Geo-distributed Scale
   In Workshop on Next Generation OS for Cyber-Physical Systems (NGOSCPS@CPS-Week), 2019 [ Paper ]
4. Sandeep D’souza and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
   CycleTandem: Energy-Saving Scheduling for Real-Time Systems with Hardware Accelerators.
   In IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), 2018 [ Paper ]
5. Sandeep D’souza and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
   QuartzV: Bringing Quality of Time to Virtual Machines.
   In IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technologies and Applications Symposium (RTAS), 2018 [ Paper ]
6. Hasan Sinan Bank, Sandeep D’souza and Aditya Rasam
   Temporal Logic (TL)-based Autonomy for Smart Manufacturing Systems.
   In North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC), 2018 [ Paper ]
7. Sandeep D’souza and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
   Time-based Coordination in Geo-Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems.
   In USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), 2017 [ Paper ]
8. Sandeep D’souza and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
   Thermal Implications of Energy-Saving Schedulers.
   In Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS), 2017 [ Paper ]
9. Fatima Anwar*, Sandeep D’souza*, Andrew Symington*, Adwait Dongare*, Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar, Anthony Rowe and Mani Srivastava
   (*Equally contributing authors)
   Timeline: An Operating-System Abstraction for Time-Aware Applications.
   In IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), 2016 [ Paper ]
10. Sandeep D’souza, Anand Bhat and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar
    Sleep Scheduling for Energy-Savings in Multi-Core Processors.
    In Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS), 2016 [ Paper ]
11. Sandeep D’souza, Siddharth Jar, Mahasweta Chakraborti, Anwesha Chatterjee and Priyadip Ray
    Heart rate estimation from Photoplethysmogram during Intensive Physical Exercise using Non-Parametric Bayesian Factor Analysis.
    In Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (ASSC), 2015 [ Paper ]
12. Sandeep D’souza, Soumya Joshi and Santanu Chattopadhyay
    A Constructive Heuristic for Application Mapping onto an Express Channel based Network-on-Chip.
    In International Symposium on VLSI Design and Test (VDAT), 2015 [ Paper ]

Journals

1. Priyajit Mukherjee, Sandeep D’souza and Santanu Chattopadhyay.
   Area Constrained Performance Optimized ASNoC Synthesis with Thermal‐aware White Space Allocation and Redistribution.
   Integration, 60, p.167, 2017 [ Paper ]
2. Sandeep D’souza, Soumya Joshi and Santanu Chattopadhyay.
   Integrated Mapping and Synthesis Techniques for Network-on-Chip Topologies with Express Channels.
   ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, 12(4), p.40, 2016 [ Paper ]

Demonstrations

1. Sandeep D’souza, Heiko Koehler, Akhilesh Joshi and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar.
   Coordinated City-Scale Traffic Management using Quartz “Time-as-a-Service”.
   In Demo Session of IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS@Work), 2018 [ Paper ]
2. Sandeep D’souza and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar.
   Time-based Distributed Multi-Robot Coordination
   In Demo Session of NSF Cyber-Physical Systems PI Meeting, 2017 [ Video ]
3. Adwait Dongare, Sandeep D’souza, Anthony Rowe and Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar.
   Synchronous Task Scheduling for Cyber-Physical Systems
   In Demo Session of IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS@Work), 2016 [ Paper ]

Experience

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Amazon (Arlington, VA)

Research Software Engineer, June 2021 - Present

• Working on the DashCart vision system, power management, data management and sensor fusion

Stealth Startup (Pittsburgh, PA)

Senior Software Engineer, January 2020 - June 2021

• Designing the systems infrastructure needed to enable connected and automated vehicles.

Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA)

AI + Research Intern, May 2019 - August 2019

• Privacy-preserving Live Streaming and Video Analytics (patent application pending)

Nutanix Inc. (San Jose, CA)

Member of Technical Staff - Intern, May 2018 - August 2018

• Time-as-a-Service for Coordinated IoT Applications: Containerized micro-service architecture for distributed IoT applications performing coordinated actions using a shared notion of time.
• Proof-of-concept reinforcement-learning-based dynamic vehicular traffic-management solution.

Siemens Corporate Technology US (Princeton, NJ)

Manufacturing and Autonomy Intern, May 2017 - August 2017

• Task and Motion Planning for an Intelligent Industrial-Robotics Manufacturing System.
• Containerization for Industrial Cloud and Edge.

Qualcomm Inc. (Bangalore, India)

Interim Engineering Intern, May 2014 - July 2014

• Development of a Fast Auto-focus Measure for Smart Devices.
• JPEG Write-Engine Performance Debug.

Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo, Japan)

Research Intern, May 2013 - July 2013

• Determining Cause-Effect Relationships between two variables.
• Image Classification using Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Networks.
• Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network-based model for Time-Series Forecasting.

Teaching

18-648 Real-Time Embedded Systems (Carnegie Mellon University)

Guest Lecturer, Fall 2017

18-748 Wireless Sensor Networks (Carnegie Mellon University)

Teaching Assistant, Spring 2017

18-648 Real-Time Embedded Systems (Carnegie Mellon University)

Teaching Assistant, Fall 2016

Service

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Professional Service

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)

Reviewer

Voluntary Positions

Graduate Student Assembly (Carnegie Mellon University)

Representative (ECE), 2016-Present

University Leadership Student Advisory Committee (Carnegie Mellon University)

Member, 2017-2018

Indian Graduate Student Association (Carnegie Mellon University)

Executive Member, 2017-Present

President, 2016-2017

Treasurer, 2015-2016