Abstract
In the past decade, we have seen tremendous progress in the world of wireless networking. On the one side, wireless LANs are making it Possible to transmit multimedia streams at unprecedented levels of fidelity and quality. Concepts such as 802.11n will soon allow data rates of over 100 Mbits/sec,which is far more than sufficient for most home Multimedia applications. On the other hands, wireless sensor networks Have emerged as a premier way of establishing distributed environment management and control. Yet, both areas are suffering from challenges in deployability, maintenance, scalability and most of all, user-friendliness. In this presentation, we will argue that the combination of the two is what is needed for the establishment of a truly user-aware and user-centric smart home environment (very often called ambient intelligence). We will outline the key requirements of what it would take and propose both a flexible infrastructure and a set of service abstractions that encompass these requirements.
Biography
Jan M. Rabaey received the EE and Ph.D degrees in applied sciences from theKatholieke 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), 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.
His main research interests include the conception and implementation of next-generation integrated wireless systems. This includes the analysis and optimization of communication algorithms and networking protocols, the study of ultra low-energy implementation architectures and circuits, and the supporting design automation environments.
