Speaker: Prof. Shankar Sastry
              Member of National Academy of Engineering
              University of California, Berkeley

Title : Sensor Webs of Smart Dust

Date and Time: TBA
Place: Life Sciences Annex Auditorium

 

Abstract:

There has been a great deal of excitement in recent times about the emergence of network embedded systems and sensor webs. In a succession of projects at Berkeley we have examined the development of hardware and open source software for providing experimental platforms for experimenting with the scalability, availability and programmability of what we have dubbed "motes" to be evocative of the eventual goal of making them be like "smart dust". I will survey the progress in this area to date and some future directions towards using these networks of embedded systems as the infrastructure of the future.

I will describe a sequence of experiments and deployments that we have performed at Berkeley and outside and draw some lessons learned from these experiments and test beds. I will try to give vignettes of the deployment lessons from areas as diverse as environmental monitoring, tracking of targets, and power consumption monitoring. I will touch on the public policy and privacy issues inherent in sensor networks.

Finally, I will comment briefly on the rudiments of analytic schemes for analyzing network embedded systems and closing the loop around sensor webs. Some web sources are

1. Wireless Embedded Systems (WEBS) Web Site http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu
2. Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium(BEARS)Web Site (see especially David Culler's talk) http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/BEARS
3. Center for Hybrid and Embedded Systems and Software (CHESS)Web Site http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu See especially the presentations from the May 10th conference at http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/conferences/04/05/program.htm .

Biodata:

S. Shankar Sastry became Chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley in January, 2001. The previous year, he served as Director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA. From 1996–1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, an organized research unit on the Berkeley campus conducting research in computer sciences and all aspects of electrical engineering. During his Directorship from 1996–1999, the laboratory grew from $29M to $50M in volume of extra-mural funding. He is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and a Professor of Bioengineering.

Dr. Sastry received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as Asst. Professor from 1980–1982 and at Harvard University as a chaired Gordon Mc Kay professor in 1994. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, Canberra, the University of Rome, Scuola Normale, and the University of Pisa, the CNRS laboratory LAAS in Toulouse (poste rouge), Professor Invite at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (CNRS laboratory VERIMAG), and as a Vinton Hayes Visiting fellow at the Center for Intelligent Control Systems at MIT. His areas of research are embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, computation in novel substrates such as DNA, nonlinear and adaptive control, robotic telesurgery, control of hybrid systems, embedded systems, sensor networks and biological motor control.

Nonlinear Systems: Analysis, Stability and Control is Dr. Sastry’s latest book, published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. He has coauthored over 250 technical papers and 6 books, including Adaptive Control: Stability, Convergence and Robustness (with M. Bodson, Prentice Hall, 1989) and A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation (with R. Murray and Z. Li, CRC Press, 1994). He has co-edited Hybrid Control II, Hybrid Control IV and Hybrid Control V (with P. Antsaklis, A. Nerode, and W. Kohn, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively) and co-edited Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (with T.Henzinger, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998) and Essays in Mathematical Robotics (with Baillieul and Sussmann, Springer-Verlag IMA Series). Books on Embedded Software and Structure from Motion in Computer Vision are in progress.

Dr. Sastry served as Associate Editor for numerous publications, including: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEEE Control Magazine; IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems; the Journal of Mathematical Systems, Estimation and Control; IMA Journal of Control and Information; the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing; Journal of Biomimetic Systems and Materials.

Dr. Sastry was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 “for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems.” He also received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development award for 1983–1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the Eckman Award of the of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, an M.A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.

He has supervised 45 doctoral students to completion and over 50 M.S. students. His students now occupy leadership roles in several locations such as Dean of Engineering at Caltech, Director of Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford, Army Research Office, and on the faculties of every major university in the United States and abroad.