Wednesday, 8 December 2010
14:00 - 15:30

Advances in Urban Sensing and Challenged Networks
(Forum Organizer and Chair: Prof. Ahmed Helmy, University of Florida, USA) 

ABSTRACT
Networked sensors will soon be part of our everyday life. Envision a world where both physical and social worlds are sensed anytime, anywhere. This is largely already a reality, due to the proliferation of handheld devices, smart phones, tablets, among others. Capabilities of these devices are growing in communication, computation, storage and sensing, opening a world of opportunities to provide novel ways to internetwork people, access information and interface with the physical world. Emerging multi-hop wireless networks, including sensor networks and delay tolerant networking paradigms, lie at the heart of this promising field. Such unprecedented integration of mobile sensing devices with the human society has enabled new areas of research including sensing the human society, behavioral-aware networking and encounter-based routing.

This panel on sensor networks hosts pioneers in the field of sensor networks and delay tolerant networks, and shall address a host of pressing issues of interest to related research and industrial communities. The topics discussed will cover a broad range of challenging problems including urban-scale sensing, health sensing, modeling, routing, deployment, operation, and management of sensor networks.

Prof. Mostafa H. Ammar (ACM/IEEE Fellow)
Regents' Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Program Director, NSF, USA

Bio:
Mostafa Ammar received the S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1985. For the years 1980-82 he worked at Bell-Northern Research (BNR), first as a Member of Technical Staff and then as Manager of Data Network Planning.

Dr. Ammar's research interests are in the areas of computer network architectures and protocols, distributed computing systems, and performance evaluation. He is the co-author of the textbook "Fundamentals of Telecommunication Networks," published by John Wiley and Sons. He is also the co-guest editor of April 1997 issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on ``Network Support for Multipoint Communication." He also was the Technical Program Co-Chair for the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2002 Networked Group Communication Workshop, 2006 Co-Next Conference, and 2007 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference.

Dr. Ammar is the holder of a 1990-1991 Lilly Teaching Fellowship and received the 1993 Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the College of Computing. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (1999-2003) and served on the editorial board of Computer Networks (1992-1999). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM.

 

Dr. Kevin Fall (IEEE Fellow)
Principal Engineer, Intel, USA

Bio:
Kevin Fall is a Principal Engineer at the Intel Research laboratory in Berkeley, California, USA. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include computer networks, operations in remote and difficult environments, security, and network science. Current work focuses on Delay Tolerant Networking and adapting modern PC servers for use as routers (part of the RouteBricks) project at Intel. He was also one of the founding researchers of the TIER project with UC Berkeley.

 

Prof. Edward Knightly (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, Rice University, USA

Bio:
Edward Knightly is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.S. from Auburn University. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received the best paper award from ACM MobiCom 2008.

Professor Knightly's research interests are in the areas of mobile and wireless networks and high-performance and denial-of-service resilient protocol design. He leads the Rice Networks Group. The group's current projects include deployment, operation, and management of a large-scale urban multi-hop multi-tier IEEE 802.11 network in a Houston under-resourced community. This network, TFA Wireless, is serving over 4,000 users in several square kilometers and employs custom-built programmable and observable access points. The group is also developing a clean-slate-design hardware platform for high-performance multi-hop wireless. The TAPs/WARP platform is now operational, and ongoing research includes cross-layer protocol design and implementation.