From Smart Dust to Reliable Networks

Wireless sensor networks are destined to see widespread adoption in such diverse sectors as industrial process control, health care, and home automation. The promise and application domain of this field continues to grow, but several false-starts have limited deployments to date. This talk will cover some of the history of the field, along with the problems and their solutions, commercial applications, and research directions.

Presenter(s)

Kris Pister is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He coined the phrase Smart Dust in 1996 to describe the impact of miniaturization in sensing, computation, and communication. He is the CTO of Dust Networks, a company that he founded to commercialize the Smart Dust vision. His research interests include sensor network protocols, MEMS, microrobots, and low-power circuits.