CS Colloquium on Oct. 1 at 11am

Title: Programming Primitives for Wireless Sensor Networks

Speaker: Matt Welsh, Harvard University
         http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/

Date: October 1 (Wednesday)
Time: 11am 
Place: MCS 135

Abstract:

Sensor networks are an emerging computing platform consisting of large
numbers of small, low-powered, wireless "motes" each with limited
computation, sensing, and communication abilities. Sensor networks are
being investigated for applications such as environmental monitoring,
seismic analysis of structures, and emergency medical care.  Sensor network
programming is incredibly difficult, due to the limited capabilities of
each node as well as the challenge of producing global behavior from a
series of complex local actions.

In this talk, I will present our work on defining a new set of concurrency
and communication primitives for sensor network programming.  I will start
by describing NesC, a component-oriented variant of C, developed with
colleagues at Intel Research and UC Berkeley. NesC supports the special
needs of sensor networks by exposing a programming model that incorporates
event-driven execution, a flexible concurrency model, and
component-oriented application design. By imposing restrictions on the
programming model, the NesC compiler is also able to perform whole-program
analyses, including static data-race detection and aggressive function
inlining.

I will also describe abstract regions, a spatial programming model for
sensor networks that captures coordination within local regions of the
network.  Abstract regions can represent a wide range of sensor network
idioms, including spatial aggregation, data sharing, and multihop
routing. In addition, abstract regions expose the inherent tradeoff between
quality/fidelity and resource consumption to the programmer.

Biography of the Speaker:

Matt Welsh is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Harvard
University. Prior to joining Harvard, he received his Ph.D. from UC
Berkeley, and spent one year as a visiting researcher at Intel Research
Berkeley. His research interests span many aspects of complex systems,
including Internet services, distributed systems, and sensor networks.  He
is also a long-time Linux hacker and is the author of "Running Linux",
published by O'Reilly and Associates.

Host: Azer Bestavros (http://www.cs.bu.edu/~best)