======================================================================== ======================================================================== D-ITET Mini-Symposium on Computer Networks - Part II ======================================================================== ======================================================================== Wednesday, Nov 9, 15.00 - 16.00, VAW B1, ETH Zurich Ratul Mahajan: Towards commodity smarthomes Wednesday, Nov 9, 16.00 - 17.00, VAW B1, ETH Zurich Tarek Abdelzaher: Social Sensing: Services and Applications ======================================================================= Program ======================================================================= Ratul Mahajan, Microsoft Research --------------------------------- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ratul/ Towards commodity smarthomes ---------------------------- Pop culture, research prototypes and corporate demos have all shown a "smarthome" where multiple devices cooperate to cater to users' wishes with little or no effort. For instance, in a home with remotely controllable lights, cameras and locks, it should be easy to automatically adjust lights based on the weather and time of day as well as remotely view who is at the door before unlocking it. But today such smarthome scenarios are limited to expert hobbyists and the rich. They are conspicuously absent from the mainstream despite the fact that the needed hardware is often readily available and inexpensive (e.g., wireless light switches, door locks, and IP cameras are US $50-100 each). I describe work that my collaborators and I have been doing towards bridging this gap. By interviewing 31 people that live with modern home-automation technology, we learned that four major barriers must be overcome before such technology can become mainstream. They are high cost of ownership, inflexibility, poor manageability, and difficulty achieving security. We argue that these barriers can be overcome through a software platform that allows developers to easily write applications that use diverse sets of commodity devices and enables non-expert home users to configure and secure their technology. We develop such a platform, called HomeOS, based on programming abstractions that are independent of device protocols, management primitives that match how home users want to manage their homes and a kernel that is agnostic of device and application details to enable easy extensibility. HomeOS already has tens of applications and supports a wide range of devices. It has been running 12 real homes for 4-8 months and 41 students have built new applications and drivers independent of our efforts. I'll describe the experiences of these users and developers. Bio: Ratul Mahajan is a Researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests include all aspects of networked systems, especially their architecture and design. His work spans Internet routing and measurements, incentive-compatible protocol design, practical models for wireless networks, and vehicular networks. He has published over 30 papers in top-tier venues such as SIGCOMM, SOSP, NSDI, MobiCom, and MobiSys. He is a winner of the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star award, the William R. Bennett prize, the SIGCOMM best paper award, and Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Washington (2005) and B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1999). Tarek Abdelzaher, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign ------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/zaher/ Social Sensing: Services and Applications ----------------------------------------- The proliferation of sensors, such as GPS devices, pedometers, smart power meters, and camera phones, in the possession of the common individual ushers in an era of sensing applications, we call social sensing, where sensors are people or devices they own that collect data on their behalf. The involvement of humans in the sensor data collection and sharing loop in these systems offers new challenges such as loss of control over sensors, sparse sampling, privacy management, and handling unreliable data from human sources. The talk describes theoretical foundations developed to address these challenges as well as their implementation within a service called FusionSuite that facilitates development of social sensing applications. Experiences with and results from a limited deployment are presented in the context of an application, called GreenGPS, that aims to reduce the energy cost of vehicular transportation. Bio: Tarek Abdelzaher received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1990 and 1994 respectively. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999 on Quality of Service Adaptation in Real-Time Systems. He has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he founded the Software Predictability Group until 2005. He is currently a Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has authored/coauthored more than 150 refereed publications in real-time computing, distributed systems, sensor networks, and control. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems, and has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, the ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks, and the Ad Hoc Networks Journal. He was Program Chair of RTAS 2004, RTSS 2006, IPSN 2010, ICDCS 2010 and ICAC 2011, as well as General Chair of RTAS 2005, IPSN 2007, RTSS 2007, DCoSS 2008, and Sensys 2008. Abdelzaher's research interests lie broadly in understanding and controlling performance and temporal properties of networked embedded and software systems in the face of increasing complexity, distribution, data dependencies, and degree of embedding in an external physical environment. Tarek Abdelzaher is a member of IEEE and ACM.