Register for IMOBILE ACM Chapter Webinar on 30 October: "Enabling Sustainable and Widespread Sensing"

October 23, 2020

Register now for "Enabling Sustainable and Widespread Sensing", a free IMOBILE ACM Chapter Webinar to be presented on Friday 30 October 2020 at 11 am IST by Ambuj Varshney, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of California, Berkeley. (IMOBILE is the India Chapter of ACM SIGMOBILE.)

Duration : 1 hour

Abstract: Over the past two decades, there has been a significant growth in sensing applications. However, we find that sensing applications are not ubiquitous. In this talk, I argue that one of the key reasons is that the architecture of a sensor node has mostly remained unchanged, i.e., a sensor coupled to a microcontroller which transmits these readings through a conventional radio transceiver such as supporting WiFi or BLE. Such a design makes the sensor nodes energy expensive, forcing them to operate on batteries, increasing cost and making them challenging to deploy and maintain at scale. In this talk, I describe efforts to rethink this architecture and enable the design of battery-free flexible sensor platforms which takes a significant step towards a sustainable and ubiquitous deployment of sensing systems. I describe my efforts to design systems that can track phenomena like changes in light and communicate them up to a few kilometres, all while consuming microwatts of power, thus enabling operation without batteries on energy harvested from the environment.

Speaker:
Ambuj Varshney is a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley. Before joining UC Berkeley, he spent several years at Uppsala University, Sweden where he also obtained his PhD (Computer Science). His thesis is centred around designing sustainable sensing systems. In his dissertation, among other contributions, through LoRea (SenSys 2017), he demonstrated the ability to communicate to large distances (as high as kilometers) while consuming a peak power of 70 microwatts. This represents 1000X lower power compared to commercially available technologies.

His research has appeared in flagship venues such as MOBICOM, MOBISYS, IPSN, SENSYS and HOTNETS. This has led him, students under his mentorship, and his advisor to several awards including: Best Paper award at ACM VLCS 2017, Best Demonstration Award at ACM WiSec 2018, Winner ACM Student Research Competition (Graduate) at ACM MobiCom 2017, Google Faculty Research Award 2018, 2019 ABB Research Award in Honor of Hubertus von Gruenberg and Uppsala University - AIP (top 15 projects from across Uppsala University in 2019). He enjoys mentoring students, with many of them now pursuing studies at leading universities of the world.

Host:
Prasant Misra, Scientist, TCS Innovation Labs