Transiently Powered Computers
Demand for tiny, easily deployable computers has driven the development of general-purpose transiently powered computers (TPCs) that lack both batteries and wired power, operating exclusively on energy harvested from remote supplies or the environment. TPCs like the Intel WISP and the UMass Moo offer sensing, computation, and communication in an electronic package that is deeply embeddable and effectively maintenance free. In this talk, Ben presented a medley of projects that focus on making TPCs useful, from energy-aware state checkpointing that insulates programs from constant power loss, to cryptographic add-ons for vulnerable medical devices, to hybrid solar and radio-frequency (RF) harvesting, to permanent installations of computation in concrete, to a software radio for RFID. TPCs move embedded systems research a step closer to Mark Weiser’s original vision of ubiquitous computing.
Ben Ransford is a graduating fifth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he works on security and embedded systems under Professor Kevin Fu. His primary research focus is making unreliable, tiny, reprogrammable energy-harvesting computers useful for reliable, general-purpose, deeply embedded computation. He can often be found counting CPU cycles or resoldering his own cold joints. His work has won “best paper” awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) and ACM SIGCOMM. www.cs.umass.edu/~ransford
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