The electromyography (EMG) signal is particularly useful in monitoring muscle activity, and it can be acquired noninvasively on the skin surface. Thanks to these key characteristics, EMG-based human–machine interfaces (HMIs) for prosthetic myocontrol, as well as gesture recognition, are becoming widespread. A key challenge in this context is to design embedded systems to process EMG signals and generate motor commands with miniaturized, unobtrusive, and low-power devices, reliably and in real time, at a relatively low cost to provide continuous monitoring without causing stigma or discomfort. This article presents an in-depth review of the current status and future research challenges in systems and circuits for EMG acquisition and processing. We start by illustrating the sensor interfaces and acquisition systems required for signal analysis to provide efficient and effective ways of understanding the signal and its nature. We, then, focus on conventional state-of-the-art (SoA) EMG gesture recognition algorithms as well as novel architectures that tackle EMG processing challenges, i.e., hyperdimensional computing (HDC), blind source separation (BSS), and spiking neural networks (SNNs). Finally, we discuss open challenges, such as EMG variability, natural control, and efficient computation, to bring the myocontrol completely out of the laboratory, filling the gap between research prototypes and real-world applications.

Datacenters play a vital role in today's society. At large, a datacenter room is a complex controlled environment composed of thousands of computing nodes, which consume kW of power. To dissipate the power, forced air/liquid flow is employed, with a cost of millions of euros per year. Reducing this cost involves using free-cooling and average case design, which can create a cooling shortage and thermal hazards. When a thermal hazard happens, the system administrators and the facility manager must stop the production to avoid IT equipment damage and wear-out. In this paper, we study the thermal hazards signatures on a Tier-0 datacenter room's monitored data during a full year of production. We define a set of rules for detecting the thermal hazards based on the inlet and outlet temperature of all nodes of a room. We then propose a custom Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to predict the hazards in advance. The results show that our TCN can predict the thermal hazards with an Fl-score of 0.98 for a randomly sampled test set. When causality is enforced between the training and validation set the F1-score drops to 0.74, demanding for an in-place online re-training of the network, which motivates further research in this context.

Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) are emerging lightweight Deep Learning models for Time Series analysis. We introduce an automated exploration approach and a library of optimized kernels to map TCNs on Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) microcontrollers. Our approach minimizes latency and energy by exploiting a layer tiling optimizer to jointly find the tiling dimensions and select among alternative implementations of the causal and dilated 1D-convolution operations at the core of TCNs. We benchmark our approach on a commercial PULP device, achieving up to $103 \times $ lower latency and $20.3 \times $ lower energy than the Cube-AI toolkit executed on the STM32L4 and from $2.9 \times $ to $26.6 \times $ lower energy compared to commercial closed-source and academic open-source approaches on the same hardware target.