Jan M. Rabaey University of California at Berkeley

Disappearing Electronics Enable Ambient Intelligence

Wireless sensor and actuator networks are rapidly gaining majortraction in a wide range of application areas, and are leading to a new computational paradigm, often called "ambient intelligence". To be successful in the commercial arena, it is essential that the individual transceiver nodes are tiny, easily integratable into the environment, and have negligible cost. Most importantly, the nodes must be self-contained in terms of energy via a one-time battery charge or a replenishable supply of energy scavenged from the environment. The good news is that the realization of sub-mW nodes is indeed a possibility through a combination of advanced technology and clever design techniques. However, getting to the cost, size and power numbers needed for a truly ubiquitous deployment, comes with a penalty in reliability. Rather than falling back on traditional reliability enhancing techniques that compromise the energy-efficiency and cost of the individual nodes, a more effective solution is to rely on the unique nature of these networks, that is the ubiquitous availability of nodes. In this presentation, we will argue that the most natural and robust way of doing so is to explicitly exploit the randomness that is an inherent component of any ad-hoc deployed wireless network.

Bio:

Jan M. Rabaey received the EE and Ph.D degrees in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, respectively in 1978 and 1983. From 1983 till 1985, he was connected to the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Research Engineer. From 1985 till 1987, he was a research manager at IMEC, Belgium, and in 1987, he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pavia (Italy), Waseda University (Japan), Technical University Delft (Netherlands), and Victoria Technical University and the University of New South Wales (Australia). He was the associate chair of the EECS Dept. at Berkeley from 1999 till 2002, and is currently the Scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), as well as the director of the GigaScale Systems Research Center (GSRC). He is an IEEE Fellow.