[Nets-seminars] Nets seminar: Ben Ransford, "Transiently Powered Computers"

[K.Jamieson at cs.ucl.ac.uk]

This coming Tuesday in the nets weekly meeting timeslot, we'll have a 
visitor from UMass Amherst giving a short talk on his research in energy 
scavenging embedded computers. Hope to see you there: abstract and bio 
follow.

Kyle

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Time + place:
Tuesday, March 6 at 2:00 PM in MPEB 6.12

Title:
Transiently Powered Computers

Abstract: Demand for tiny, easily deployable computers has driven the 
development of general-purpose transiently powered computers (TPCs) that 
lack both batteries and wired power, operating exclusively on energy 
harvested from remote supplies or the environment. TPCs like the Intel WISP 
and the UMass Moo offer sensing, computation, and communication in an 
electronic package that is deeply embeddable and effectively maintenance 
free. In this talk, I will present a medley of projects that focus on 
making TPCs useful, from energy-aware state checkpointing that insulates 
programs from constant power loss, to cryptographic add-ons for vulnerable 
medical devices, to hybrid solar and radio-frequency (RF) harvesting, to 
permanent installations of computation in concrete, to a software radio for 
RFID. TPCs move embedded systems research a step closer to Mark Weiser's 
original vision of ubiquitous computing.

Speaker bio: Ben Ransford is a graduating fifth-year Ph.D. student at the 
University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he works on security and 
embedded systems under Professor Kevin Fu. His primary research focus is 
making unreliable, tiny, reprogrammable energy-harvesting computers useful 
for reliable, general-purpose, deeply embedded computation. He can often be 
found counting CPU cycles or resoldering his own cold joints. His work has 
won "best paper" awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 
(Oakland) and ACM SIGCOMM.

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~ransford/