September 2008 Archives

This week, I'm super excited to give a talk at PICNIC. This is the TED of Europe and everyone from Richard Branson to Genevieve Bell (ala Intel) to Werner Vogels to a million other amazing individuals will be speaking. They all have a huge interest in changing the world, and they are doing it today. They're focusing on energy, environment, IT, media, and really everything else. I'm honored to give a talk in the presence of such luminary individuals.

My talk will focus on how pervasive computing is making energy management real -- no one really knows how or where they're using energy. While data centers are the current "fad", the real problem is managing the millions of inefficient things that are out there. Once you know where the energy inefficiencies are, you can then take action to manage them. Without knowing the root of the problem, you're shooting in the dark, and that's where Sentilla can tell you exactly where the problems exist.

Where: Flexbar I, PICNIC, Amsterdam, Netherlands
When: Friday, September 26 @ 9:00.

The press release gives some context (immediately below) -- although stay tuned to the bottom for the next event -- BAIA!

Sentilla, a pioneering leader and supplier of pervasive computing solutions, today announced that Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Joe Polastre will join other industry luminaries next week at the PICNIC Conference ’08 in Amsterdam, September 24-26. The annual gathering showcases the world’s foremost thought leaders, technologists, and innovators who will share their insights on media, technology, arts, and entertainment. In addition, the conference will spotlight cutting-edge products and services in demonstrations and panel discussions. Dr. Polastre will participate in a session entitled, “Internet of Things,” aimed at raising attendee awareness of a new ecology of pervasive computing solutions. In his talk, he’ll discuss how embedded intelligence in objects all around us can provide meaningful information about the things that people care about—like saving the planet—and provide insights on energy management solutions that can leverage energy harvesting to provide industrial manufacturers with “green,” maintenance-free solutions.

For example, metals manufacturing production consumes a tremendous amount of energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. In these harsh, non-stop industrial environments, up to one-third of the production costs come from the energy required to operate these plants. Thus, even a one-percent reduction in energy usage in that industry will yield savings in hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention decreasing harmful environmental emissions derived as a result of that efficiency. Sentilla’s pervasive computing solutions are aimed at helping industrial manufacturers manage their energy usage, and thereby re-direct the energy efficiency gained to improve plant operations, increase production throughput, and ultimately achieve greater profitability.

But why stop there? I'll also tell you why this is important and how companies need to adjust their business models in the Business Association Italy America (BAIA) Forum in October. Organized by Marco Sgroi (who has done some incredible work with pervasive computers on the body to help in things like rehabilitation), I'm honored to participate in this forum back in the US. With Italian ancestry (my last name was originally Polastri, not Polastre, but was changed in Ellis Island), I'm thrilled to participate in this panel as a real Italian -- and entrepreneur! Hope to see you there.

Where: HP Auditorium, 306 Soda Hall, University of California, Berkeley
When: Wednesday, October 8 @ 6:30pm

The continuous decrease of the size and the cost of electronic devices is gradually making the vision of ubiquitous networks of wireless sensors a reality. After almost a decade of extensive research, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are in the midst of the transition towards industrial deployment in various application domains such as automotive, environmental monitoring, health care, building and industrial automation, energy management.

BAIA presents a panel of outstanding experts from the academia and the industry, who have played an essential role in the history of WSNs. The panel will discuss applications and business models of WSNs and will address questions such as:
- what applications will drive the mass deployment of WSNs both in the short and in the long term?
- what players will be most successful in the WSN domain and what business model will they adopt?
- what are the main barriers before wide adoption of WSNs?
- when will the deployment of WSNs happen in large volumes?

Panelists:
- Prof. David Culler, University of California at Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Arch Rock
- Mike Horton, CEO and Co-Founder Crossbow
- Prof. Raju Pandey, University of California at Davis, CTO and Co-Founder Synapsense
- Prof. Kris Pister, University of California at Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Dust Networks
- Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-Founder, Sentilla
- Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, University of California at Berkeley, CTA and Co-Founder Cadence Design Systems

Program:
6:30 - 7:00 pm Registration / Networking
7:00 - 8:00 pm Program

Pervasive computers enable virtually any measurement to be made across virtually any environment. But how would you power your network? What if you wanted to place the computer in the middle of a field? Or in a tree? Or in the desert? Or a cave? How long would the computer run given alkaline or lithium batteries? Could it draw power from its surroundings? Could it be packaged in a reasonable size?

These are not hypothetical questions. These questions arise with almost every customer interaction at Sentilla. After all, a pervasive computer is only useful for as long as it interacts with the world, and there are environmental limitations to primary batteries, particularly in extremely hot areas. These questions have also persisted for as long as pervasive computers have existed. They literally funded my battery research at UC Berkeley, and my thermoelectric device implementations at Wireless Industrial Techologies.

Luckily, Sentilla computers "sip" energy, and can be readily powered from environmental sources, whether it's the light from the sun, the heat from an exhaust pipe, or the vibration of a motor. Many energy harvesting solutions are cost competitive with standard batteries, particularly for large or remote installations where field maintenance is an unattractive option. At Sentilla, working with our partners, we have enabled java-based solutions to run primarily from the energy available in their environments, be they HVAC subsystems, aluminum smelters, or oil tankers.

As Sentilla begins to explore energy reduction with our customers, we recognize that it's important to keep the focus on reducing energy consumption for critical applications, rather than creating another subsystem where batteries must be continually replaced. To this end, we're publishing a white paper that introduces solar, thermal, and vibrational harvesting methods in the context of pervasive computing. We keep the science behind the harvesting techniques at a high level, but we give proper size and placement context. We hope this white paper provides an introduction to the exciting abilities that modern energy harvesting devices offer, and we think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the amount of work you can extract from an computer smaller than a can of Coke!

Read the white paper >>

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk and a tutorial at GKmM Summer School 2008. The GKmM Summer School is a highly selective summer program that brings the brightest minds around Europe together. Held at a remote castle in Germany, participants focus on heterogeneous networks, discuss the state of the art of sensing, and formulate new ideas and interesting applications. The program was very well run and had a good mix of lectures from unmanned vehicle control to wireless sensor networks. Most of the lectures were academic with interesting novel applications -- a very cool underwater unmanned manaray, for example.

My lectures took a little different approach; I focused on how pervasive computing was being used in the real world. The first talk covered applications like emergency response, logistics, and energy management. I've deployed applications in all of these areas, and discussed what it takes to implement a real-world pervasive system. I talked about my experience with the Sentilla platform and how it enables these applications and reduces time to market.

In my second session, I gave a hands-on lab demonstrating the Sentilla platform. In the three hours allotted for this tutorial the students were introduced to the Sentilla Perk Kit hardware and software including the Sentilla tools, mote architecture, debugging techniques and architecture schemes for building applications using Java on a resource-constrained device. Once the architecture was covered we moved on to how to define a sensor, using the accelerometer and the temperature sensor in the JCreate as examples. By the end of this tutorial all 8 groups were building real-world applications like a digital dice game, shown on Sentilla Labs, to an emergency beacon that could be used in search and rescue.

For more information on the GKmM Summer School here is the main page. It was great to see how quickly the participants picked up pervasive computing and built applications, and I'm excited to participate in more summer schools in the future.