EE392S Sensor Networks Seminar
February 3, 2004, 4:15 p.m.
Jordan Hall, room 041
Stanford University

Information Processing in Sensor Networks

Feng Zhao
Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University
www.parc.com/zhao

Abstract

Information processing is a central theme in sensor network research since the primary purpose of a sensor network is to make sense of a physical environment through data gathering and interpretation. In this talk, I will describe some of the challenges we are facing in designing scalable and robust algorithms and systems for practical sensing applications, and present our recent work on sensor tasking, distributed inference, and programming abstractions. Videos of various sensor network systems and demos we have built will be shown, including a video sensor network testbed at PARC.

Biography

Feng Zhao is a Principal Scientist and directs the Embedded Collaborative Computing Area in the Systems and Practices Laboratory at PARC (formerly known as Xerox PARC). He is also Consulting Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. The two main projects in his group, Collaborative Sensing and Smart Matter Diagnostics, investigate how MEMS sensor and networking technology can change the way we build and interact with physical devices and environments. His research interest includes networked embedded systems, sensor networks, diagnostics, qualitative reasoning, and control of dynamical systems. Dr. Zhao received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1992, where he developed one of the first algorithms for fast N-body computation in three spatial dimensions and phase-space nonlinear control synthesis. From 1992 to 1997, he was Assistant and Associate Professor (with tenure) of Computer and Information Science at Ohio State University. His INSIGHT Group developed the SAL software tool for rapid prototyping of spatio-temporal data analysis applications; the tool is currently used by a number of other research groups. He joined Xerox PARC in 1997. Dr. Zhao received the ONR Young Investigator Award and the NSF Young Investigator Award, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science. His research has been featured in news media such as BusinessWeek, BBC World News, and Technology Review. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the new ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, to be launched in early 2004, and serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, AI Magazine, New Generation Computing, and guest co-edited several special issues on sensor and actuator networks. He co-chaired the 1st and 2nd International Workshops on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN: www.parc.com/events/ipsn03). He has authored or co-authored about 100 technical papers, and is a co-inventor of five US Patents and six pending patent applications.