Speckled Computing

DK Arvind, Director of the Research Consortium in Speckled Computing

Wednesday 2nd February 2005, 6:30 pm (refreshments available from 6:10 pm)

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, 36 York Place, Edinburgh EH1 3HU (street map)

Speckled Computing offers a radically new concept in information technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate and exchange information. Specks will eventually be minute semiconductor grains - the size of a pinhead - that can sense and compute locally and communicate wirelessly. Each speck will be autonomous, with its own captive, renewable energy source. Thousands of specks, scattered or sprayed on the person or surfaces, will collaborate as programmable computational networks called Specknets. Computing with Specknets will enable linkages between the material and digital worlds with a finer degree of spatial resolution than hitherto possible; this will be both fundamental and enabling technology towards the goal of truly ubiquitous computing. The talk will give an overview of the Speckled Computing Consortium - a vertically-integrated grouping of physicists, electronic engineers and computer scientists - working towards the realisation of specknets, and outline the many technical challenges, with particular emphasis on the architecture and networking protocols for dense, programmable networks of resource-constrained mobile specks.

About the speaker

DK Arvind is a Reader in the School of Informatics (www.inf.ed.ac.uk), University of Edinburgh, and a former Director of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture, at the same university. He was previously for four years, a Research Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA. He is the founder Director of the Research Consortium in Speckled Computing (www.specknet.org) - a national project of 25 core researchers - physicists, electronic engineers and computer scientists drawn from 5 universities. His research interests include the software and hardware architectures of wireless embedded systems. His research has been/being funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Scottish Higher Educational Funding Council, US Office of Naval Research, and leading technological companies such as ARM, Hitachi, Matsushita/Panasonic, Sharp, SUN Microsystems, and Xilinx.