Computer Science Class of '60s Scholars Speaker - Josh Smith '91

Thursday, 9/19
8:00pm in Wege Auditorium (TCL 123)
Reception to follow.

&

Friday, 9/20
2:35pm in Wege Auditorium (TCL 123)

 

Joshua R. Smith ’91
Zeutschel Professor
Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering
Department of Electrical and Computer Science
University of Washington

Thursday:

Perpetual Computing: Technologies for Banishing Batteries

The energy efficiency of computing has improved by a factor of more than a trillion since the electronic computer was invented.  This astounding energy efficiency scaling is creating the opportunity for battery-free sensing and computing systems that are powered by radio waves and other ambient energy sources.  Such devices can be implanted inside the body, permanently built into structures, or deployed at scales where batteries and wires are infeasible.  I will describe my group’s work aiming to enable battery-free, perpetual sensing and computing systems.  I will describe our work on RF energy harvesting, wireless power transfer, and ambient backscatter communication, as well as sensor systems built using these building blocks, including a battery-free mobile phone and camera systems.

Friday:

Electric Field Sensing,
 Pretouch Sensing & Robotics

I will discuss our work on sensing and perception for robotics.

Joshua R. Smith ’91 is the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he leads the Sensor Systems research group.  He was named an Allen Distinguished Investigator by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and he is the thrust leader for Communications and Interface in the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.

In recent years his research has focused on wirelessly powering and communicating with sensor systems in applications such implanted biomedical electronics, ubiquitous computing, and robotics. Previously, he co-invented an electric field sensing system for suppressing unsafe airbag firing that is included in every Honda car. Three startup companies have spun out of his lab: Jeeva Wireless, Wibotic, and Proprio. He received B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy from Williams College, an M.A. in physics from Cambridge University thanks to a Herchel Smith Scholarship from Williams, and the Ph.D. and S.M. degrees from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (formerly the Media Lab’s Physics and Media group).