Sustainable Sensing for a Sustainable World

Abstract: Wireless sensors and edge-cloud analytics can gather and process vast amounts of data about the physical world, offering radical new insights about everything from critical infrastructure to interpersonal interactions. But designing, deploying, and operating geographically-distributed, resource-constrained systems consisting of a hierarchy of sensing, storage, compute, and communication elements raises many interesting new challenges across the system stack. In this talk, I will share our experiences and lessons designing systems to address a range of sustainability-motivated problems in energy and power grid monitoring in North America and Sub-Saharan Africa. The evolution of these efforts from seemingly trivial connected sensors with simple cloud analytics to more complex networked sensors with sophicated sensing and communications to sustainable perceptual networks that perform multi-spectral data fusion and inference at the edge to detect complex buf sparse grid faults has highlighted numerous exciting technical and methodological challenges ripe for attention from the research community.

Bio: Prabal Dutta is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. His interests span circuits, systems, and software, with a focus on mobile, wireless, embedded, networked, and sensing systems that have applications in health, energy, and the environment. His work has yielded dozens of hardware and software systems, has won a Test-of-Time Award (SenSys’22) and a “Potential Test of Time 2025” Award (HotWireless’15), five Top Pick/Best Paper Awards (MICRO’16, SenSys'10, IPSN'10, HotEmNets'10, and IPSN'08), two Best Paper Nominees (IPSN’18, SenSys’10), numerous demo, design, poster, and industry contests (MobiCom’22 Best Poster Award, CONIX Best Poster Award 2020, IPSN’18 Best Demo Runner-Up, David Wessel Memorial Best Demo Award 2017 & 2019, TI Innovation Challenge’15 Best Environmental Impact Award, ISLPED'10 and ISLPED'08 Design Contest Winners, and Comdex Best of Show), has been directly commercialized by a dozen companies and indirectly by many dozens more, and is on display at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum. His work has been recognized with an Okawa Foundation Grant, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Popular Science Brilliant Ten Award, and an Intel Early Career Award. He has served as a program chair for MobiSys, BuildSys, SenSys, IPSN, HotMobile, ESWEEK IoT Day, HotMobile, and HotPower, and as a member of the DARPA ISAT Study Group and the 2024-2026 Defense Science Study Group (DSSG). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MS in Electrical Engineering and a BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University. He has co-founded several companies based on his research including Cubeworks, Gridware, nLine, and Vizi.