HESL carries out use-inspired research using state-of-the art tools and technologies to create intellectual property that can spur sustainable growth in next-generation hardware and embedded systems. Research areas include embedded vision (scene understanding for autonomous vehicles, collaborative vision based sensing, video surveillance), reconfigurable computing (overlay architectures for FPGA based computing, high level synthesis, custom computing), computer architecture (application-specific processors, heterogeneous MPSoC), hardware security (secure processor, countermeasure against side-channel attacks, high-level synthesis for cryptography), cyber-physical systems (mixed-criticality real-time scheduling, predictable multi-core processing, internet-of-things), and brain-computer interface (BCI for games, neuro-rehabilitation, assistive technologies).