CMPE280N: Seminar on Networks

Fall 2022: Thursdays at 1:00 pm, Room E2-315

• October 13 — Kerry
• October 20 — Anuj dry run
• October 27 — Dylan + ?
• November 3 — Li
• November 10 — Colleen Josephson

Title: Enabling sustainable sensor networks with RF backscatter

Abstract: We need affordable and innovative sensing to assist in tackling global-scale problems like sustainably feeding the next billion. RF backscatter systems such as RFID are well-known in the sensing community because of their low power consumption. This talk explores how we can enable robust indoor/outdoor RF-backscatter sensing by leveraging advances in low-power embedded systems. It will describe the challenges faced in low-power and sustainable sensor networks, and provide an overview of an outdoor radar backscatter sensing system that uses RF to measure soil moisture with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art commercial sensors, but at a fraction of the cost. Also to be discussed is recent work on renewably powering outdoor sensor systems via energy harvested from non-traditional sources like microbes.

Bio: Colleen Josephson is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UC Santa Cruz, where she leads the jLab in Smart Sensing, and is a faculty affiliate with the UCSC Center for Agroecology and the UCSC Hardware Systems Collective. She is also an associate editor for the new journal, IEEE Transactions on AgriFood Electronics (TAFE). Her research interests include wireless communication and sensing systems, with a focus on technologies to enable and improve sustainable practices in agriculture and beyond. Colleen completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Before beginning her PhD, she worked at Cisco Meraki as a wireless engineer, and even before that she received her SB and MEng degrees from MIT. Her recent recognitions include being named a 2022 N2Women Rising Star in Networking in Communications, a 2020 Rising Star in EECS, and in 2019 she was a finalist in the MIT Bay Area Research Slam.

• November 17 — Sinjoni
• November 24 — Holiday
• December 1 — Supraja

Daniel Alves, Katia Obraczka, Rick Lindberg, “Identifying Relevant Data Center Telemetry Using Change Point Detection”, IEEE CloudNet 2020.

K. Veenstra and K. Obraczka, “Grid Partition: an Efficient Greedy Approach for Outdoor Camera IoT Deployments in 2.5D Terrain”, In Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2020), August 2020.

Danielle L. Ferreira, B. Nunes, Carlos Alberto V. Campos, K. Obraczka, “A Deep Learning Approach for Identifying User Communities Based on Geographical Preferences and Its Applications to Urban and Environmental Planning”, in ACM Trans. Spatial Algorithms Syst., Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2020.

The first week of January, before the first day of classes on January 7, the labs in E2-311 and E2-305 will do some house cleaning and reorganization. Here is a list of items:

• E-waste any Scorpion equipment that cannot be repurposed.
• Decide to keep/discard/donate remaining parts and equipment.
• Shred boxes of old exams (2 years old or more).
• Reorganize everything that remains.
• Create an inventory of everything and place in a Google Doc.

Once the BTS parts have been organized, Kerry will contact John Steele.