Oct. 28 - Computing without Reliable Power with J. Sorber (Clemson)

 

Jacob Sorber from Clemson University will present, "Computing without Reliable Power" . This talk will take place in Room 120 and CSE 600 students should sign in. 

Abstract
If the Internet of Things is to become more than just a hype-storm, it will have to do so without the help of batteries. We are simply not going to recharge, replace, and dispose of trillions of batteries. But, hope remains. Battery-less sensing devices are poised to transform science and society by enabling long-term maintenance-free data gathering, but we currently lack the hardware platforms, abstractions, languages, and tools that we need to harness this potential. These devices replace batteries with capacitors, which has many advantages. They are smaller, cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and can work for decades (most batteries wear out after 2–5 years), but they don't store as much energy, and they fail more often. Even with energy harvesting advances, today's batteryless devices are difficult to program, test, and deploy, due to unpredictable energy supplies, limited energy storage, and frequent power failures. 

In this talk, I will describe how we are learning to compute in the face of unreliable power. I will describe hardware and software, tools and techniques, and new programming models for building tiny sensing systems that depend on harvested energy, that can be deployed for long periods of time without battery changes, and that are able to adapt to uncertain energy conditions and thrive in spite of frequent power failures.

Bio:
Jacob Sorber is an Assistant Professor and Dean's Professor of Computer Science at Clemson University. His research makes mobile sensors, sensor networks, and embedded systems more efficient, robust, deployable, and secure, by exploring novel systems (both hardware and software) and languages. His research is supported by the NSF, the USGS, General Electric and other sources. He works on a wide range of problems in health, biology, agriculture, and manufacturing, and has recently received an NSF CAREER award and a Best Paper Award at ACM SenSys. Before joining the Clemson faculty, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University.