TerraSwarm PI Ana Claudia Arias Serves as Advisor on Pan-European Collaborative Research Project

TerraSwarm PI Ana Claudia Arias will serve as a US Advisor on a five-million Euro pan-European collaborative research project to create new low cost, light weight, wearable devices by developing new organic semiconductor materials that can be printed on flexible film.  Funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, EXTended Model of Organic Semiconductors (EXTMOS) will use a new approach to develop the next generation of devices for the Internet of Things. Led by the University of Bath, the collaborative project includes twelve European academic and industrial partners. Possible applications include medical sensors, flexible displays, and low energy diffuse lighting.

According to her website, Ana Claudia Arias received her PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge, UK before joining the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the use of electronic materials processed from solution in flexible electronic systems. She uses printing techniques to fabricate flexible large area electronic devices and sensors. She is a co-investigator on the TerraSwarm HumanIntranet Project, a two-year project to develop a first-generation Human Intranet intended to boost human input-output performance as an open, scalable, form fitting platform.

TerraSwarm PI Pieter Abeel honored as recipient of the PECASE

TerraSwarm PI Pieter Abeel was honored at the White House on May 5th as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to machine learning and robotic manipulation of deformable objects and his dedication to the education of the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Pieter Abeel is co-investigator of the Human Intranet project, a two-year Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) STARnet funded project to develop a first-generation Human Intranet intended to boost human input-output performance as an open, scalable, form fitting platform. According to his website, Pieter Abeel's work includes the development of apprenticeship learning algorithms which have enabled advanced helicopter aerobatics. His group has also enabled the first end-to-end completion of reliably picking up a crumpled laundry article and folding it. His current research focuses on robotics and machine learning with a particular focus on challenges in personal robotics, surgical robotics and connectomics.

Established in 1996, the PECASE is the highest level of recognition for science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Considerations for the award include public education, community outreach, and commitment to community service as shown through scientific leadership.

TerraSwarm PI Jan Rabaey to appear at 2016 International Microwave Symposium

TerraSwarm PI Jan Rabaey will give a keynote address titled "The Human Intranet- Where Swarms and Humans Meet" at closing ceremony of the 2016 International Microwave Symposium.

The 2016 International Microwave Symposium, an annual conference and exhibition of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), will be held in San Francisco from May 22 - 27, 2016. The event includes a week of technical sessions, interactive forums, workshops, short courses, seminars, and plenary and panel sessions for technologists focused on microwave theory and practice. The IMS trade show is expected to draw the participation of more than 600 companies. PR Newswire has posted a story about the event highlighting PI Jan Rabey's address.

 "The Human Intranet- Where Swarms and Humans Meet"  Jan M. Rabaey, Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professor, UC Berkeley, 2016 International Microwave Symposium, May 26, 2016, San Francisco.

Abstract:
Some of most compelling application domains of the IoT and Swarm concepts relate to how humans interact with the world around it and the cyberworld beyond. While the proliferation of communication and data processing devices has profoundly altered our interaction patterns, little has been changed in the way we process inputs (sensory) and outputs (actuation). The combination of IoT (Swarms) and wearable devices offers the potential for changing all of this. Yet, realizing full potential requires that a number of barriers are overcome, most notably the non-scalable nature of the current deployments.

The Human Intranet proposes an open scalable platform that seamlessly integrates an ever-increasing number of sensor, actuation, computation, storage, communication and energy nodes located on, in, or around the human body acting in symbiosis with the functions provided by the body itself. The traditional set of senses and interactions is to be augmented by a set of new capabilities, some of which might be hard to even imagine today.

TerraSwarm PI Sanjit Seshia to Receive 2016 Frederick Emmons Terman Award

TerraSwarm PI Sanjit Seshia will be presented with the 2016 Frederick Emmons Terman Award in October at the 46th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. The Frederick Emmons Terman Award, sponsored by the Hewlet-Packard Company since 1969, recognizes the contributions of one outstanding young electrical/ computer engineering educator to the profession annually.

Technologies Sanjit Seshia and his group developed support the first online course offering to include a physics-based virtual robotics laboratory along with automatic built-in grading and feedback. His other contributions to the field include co-authorship of "Introduction to Embedded Systems - A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach," a textbook used at UC Berkeley and universities globally. Previous award recipients include Ali Niknejad (2012), Randy Katz (1999), TerraSwarm PI Edward Lee (1997), and Leon Chua (1974).

TerraSwarm Graduate Student Pat Pannuto Receives Outstanding Poster Award at INC12

TerraSwarm graduate student Pat Pannuto has been presented with the Twelfth International Nanotechnology Conference  (INC12) Outstanding Poster Award for "Accessors and the RoboCafé: Interoperability in the Internet of Things."  The conference was held in Leuven, Belgium from May 10-12, 2016.

The poster includes the following acknowledgement "Sponsored by the TerraSwarm Research Center, one of six centers administered by the STARnet phase of the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP) a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA."

Abstract:
At DARPA's WaitWhat? conference in 2015, the TerraSwarm Research Center debuted the RoboCafé, an interconnected swarm of robots, sensors, and people. A key challenge for the emerging Internet of Things is interoperability.

Interoperation is not simply support for three vendors' smart light bulb APIs. It requires policies for sharing contested resources and decoupling intent from devices -- raising the blinds may light a room as easily as turning on a light.

Accessors are an active research project exploring these questions, and the RoboCafé an application that stressed, tested, broke, and informed Accessor design.
In the RoboCafé, a swarm of mobile robots patrol the café, moving in a sentry pattern to periodically visit the whole space. As the robots move around an online summarization algorithm continuously extracts "interesting" things the robot encounters, clips of each new face the robot sees. Users in the RoboCafé can use a smartphone app to order candy or snacks. Upon ordering, the smartphone is automatically localized and a robot is taken off patrol and tasked to deliver the goods to the user. At any point, the detection of applause in the environment will demand robot attention no matter its previous task, simulating critical events such as gunshot detection.

The key technical challenge of the RoboCafé lies in the integration of very disparate technologies: online summarization of key events, an acoustic-based positioning service for localizing people in the café environment, a machine-learning framework for context detection, and the control of a swarm of mobile robots. Accessors recast each of these technologies as event-driven actors with tightly constrained interfaces. The Accessor architecture decouples the control and data plane, starting acoustic event detection and handling reported applause events, but leaving the transport of high-bandwidth audio signals to the underlying system. A policy engine federates access to robots, allowing applause events to supersede food delivery or patrols. The unified model of computation facilitates reasoning of interactions between applications and opens the door to applying formal methods for proving overall system correctness.

Article Highlights Software Analysis Tool and Applications in Automotive Industry

A software analysis tool currently in development by TerraSwarm postdoc Armin Wasicek was highlighted in an article "A Secret Tool to Catch the Next VW-Style Emissions Cheat," by David Talbot in the MIT Technology Review.  The team is working on software that uses the data from an operating vehicle including the rate of fuel consumption, RPM, and temperature. This data is compared to the car's standard operating parameters to identify anomalies. In a matter of hours, the software identifies problems that currently take a day or more to diagnose.

The development of this software has explored possible applications in detection of "chip-tuning" within vehicles. The  article explains that it is also likely to have broad applications in automotive emission controls and safety.  As the automotive industry works to address security and develop methods to identify problems within automotive IT systems, this new software is expected to be an important contribution to the field.

TerraSwarm Interactive Pedestrian Lights Installed in San Leandro

TerraSwarm Interactive Lights have been installed around the perimeter of Casa Peralta, a museum and historic landmark, in San Leandro, California.

The team for this project includes TerraSwarm PI Bjoern Hartmann. In designing the installation the project team considered elements of function, safety, and aesthetics with a focus on creating a positive user experience. The installation is intended to encourage pedestrian traffic by providing energy efficient interactive lighting to the area. It uses exiting infrastructure, is cost efficient, and contributes less light pollution then conventional lighting options.

The presence of a pedestrian activates the lighting pattern. Sensors and stored data are used to regulate the lighting schemes, incorporating the elements of pedestrian speed and direction in the interactive display.