D K Arvind

D K Arvind is a Professor in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, where he holds the Chair in Distributed Wireless Computation, and the CITRIS Visiting Professor (2007-15) at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. For four years previously he was a Research Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA.

He has pioneered the design of processor architectures as asynchronous networks and the hardware-software co-design of resource-constrained programmable architectures for wireless applications. He is the Director of the Centre for Speckled Computing and has been the Principal Investigator (PI) on projects funded by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Scottish Funding Council (SFC), EU Framework 7, Scottish Enterprise, US Office of Naval Research, US Air Force Research Laboratory, and by leading technology companies including ARM, Hitachi, Otto Bock Gmbh, Panasonic, RedKite Animations, Sharp, Sun Research Labs, SAS, Selex Galileo and Xilinx. He was the PI and founding Director of the £5.3M EPSRC- and SFC-funded Research Consortium in Speckled Computing (2003-10): an interdisciplinary consortium of computer scientists, electrochemists, physicists and electronic engineers drawn from five UK universities.

Research interests include the design, analysis and integration of miniature networked embedded systems which combine sensing, processing and wireless networking capabilities targeted at applications in healthcare, digital media and environmental monitoring.

Abstract

A specknet is a wireless network of autonomous specks which provides one or more services: each speck is capable of sensing and is programmed to process this data, and a collection of specks collaborate to extract information from the sensed data in a distributed manner.

Specknets link the physical world of sensory data with the virtual world of network of computers. Specknet on the person with the appropriate sensors can, for example, monitor movement and physiological conditions and, in turn, infer the state of his/her well being which can be transmitted over the internet. Computation with specknets, or Speckled Computing, affords new modes of interaction with the digital world in which the physical world is the primary site of interaction.

The talk will give a broad overview of Speckled Computing and will be illustrated with examples of applications in healthcare, digital media and environmental monitoring.