Seminarium om Speckled Computing

Seminar in room 4523 Tuesday, June 17, at 10.15:

D.K. Arvind, Reader at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley:

Speckled Computing

A specknet is a wireless network of autonomous specks which provides distributed services: each speck is capable of sensing and processing the data under program control; the specks themselves are connected as an ad-hoc wireless network which collaborate to process information in a distributed manner.

Specknets link the physical world of sensory data with the virtual world of networks of computers. A specknet on the person with inertial sensors, for example, is capable of tracking 3-D movement of the limbs in real-time, or the position of the person in the environment, and this information can be stored, manipulated and accessed remotely over the internet. Computing with specknets, or Speckled Computing, affords new models of unencumbered interaction with the digital world, in which the physical environment is the primary site of interaction.

The talk will give a broad overview of the research undertaken in the Consortium – a multidisciplinary collaboration of computer scientists, electronic engineers, physicists and electrochemists drawn from four universities to realise miniature specks. Video clips will be presented to demonstrate specknets designed for fully wireless, full- body 3-D motion capture, and for applications ranging from the telemedicine (physiotherapy and gait analysis), sports (real-time analysis of golf swing) to telepresence robots.

Brief Bio
DK Arvind is a Reader in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, and CITRIS Visiting Professor at the University of California, at Berkeley (2007-11). He was previously for four years a Research Scientist in the School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He is the founder Director and Principal Investigator of the Research Consortium in Speckled Computing (www.specknet.org) – a multidisciplinary grouping of computer scientists, electronic engineers, electrochemists and physicists drawn from five universities, to research the next generation of miniature wireless sensor networks. The Consortium has attracted research funding in the excess of £5.2 Million (~US$ 10 million)
(2004-10) from the Scottish Funding Council, and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the US). In the past his research has been funded by EPSRC, US Office of Naval Research, Scottish Enterprise/ Cadence Design Systems, Sharp, Hitachi, Panasonic/Mastushita, Agilent, ARM and SUN Microsystems. His research interests include the design, analysis and integration of miniature networked embedded systems which combine sensing, processing and wireless networking capabilities.