EWSN2015
12th European Conference
on Wireless Sensor Networks

Porto, Portugal
9-11 February 2015

Keynotes

◀ EWSN 2015 Program

February 10th, Tuesday

Keynote I: The Rise of the Smart Household
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Kamin Whitehouse
University of Virginia

Abstract:
The “smart home” has officially arrived. People can improve the comfort, convenience, and energy usage of their home with devices they purchase at the local hardware store. However, these devices can only monitor and control the physical home, and it remains an open challenge to monitor the most interesting things inside the home: the people. Without the use of cameras, microphones, or wearable tags, today’s energy monitoring systems cannot tell who left the lights on, and elderly monitoring systems cannot tell who is sleeping well or accessing the medicine cabinet. The next research challenge in this domain is to evolve from a "smart home" that is concerned with the home itself to what I call a "smart household" that is concerned with both the home and its occupants. In this talk, I’ll discuss the major challenges of monitoring individual people in a multi-person home, as well as several emerging approaches and the possible advantage over today's notion of a smart home.

Bio:
Kamin Whitehouse works in the areas of wireless embedded systems, with a focus on intelligent buildings. He is a Commonwealth Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia, is a Siebel scholar, and was awarded NSF CAREER award. He earned his BA and BS from Rutgers University and his MS and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

February 11th, Wednesday

Keynote II: Predictable wireless multi-hop comunication?
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Lothar Thiele
ETH Zurich

Abstract:
The field of cyber-physical systems is now in a stage where serious applications of societal and economic importance are in reach such as internet of things, industrial process monitoring and control, environment monitoring, logistics, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control. In many of these applications, measurements are precious, data must not be lost and should arrive under real-time constraints. In order to significantly advance this class of application domains by using wireless sensor networks as a novel means of observation and interaction, it is inevitable that low power wireless communication is available with known and predictable properties .
In high dependable embedded systems such as automotive and avionics, the required predictability is achieved via the classical concept of time-triggered architectures and globally synchronous operation. The talk will introduce recently proposed models and methods that built on comparable principles and lead to predictable and efficient multi-hop wireless communication.
The concept of synchronous transmissions allows to abstract away network state in multi-hop communication and to treat the entire network as a single device that runs on a single logical clock. The nodes are time-synchronized and communicate in a time-triggered fashion according to a global communication schedule. In other words, the wireless network is turned into a shared bus. Such a disruptive approach is in sharp contrast to classical low-power wireless multi-hop protocols that build upon neighbor selection, topology control and routing.
The talk covers the underlying models and methods in this emerging field, extensions towards all-to-all data sharing and programmable in-network processing, the embedding into higher level protocols that provide virtually synchronous executions, formal modeling and probabilistic guarantees, and real-time operation that provides hard guarantees on end-to-end packet deadlines and seamlessly handles dynamic changes in network state and real-time requirements.

Bio:
Lothar Thiele received his Diplom-Ingenieur and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich in 1981 and 1985 respectively. After completing his Habilitation thesis from the Institute of Network Theory and Circuit Design of the Technical University Munich, he joined the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University in 1987.
In 1988, he took up the chair of microelectronics at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Saarland, Saarbrucken, Germany. He joined ETH Zurich, Switzerland, as a full Professor of Computer Engineering, in 1994.
His research interests include models, methods and software tools for the design of embedded systems, embedded software and bioinspired optimization techniques.
Lothar Thiele is associate editor of IEEE Transaction on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Real-Time Systems, Journal of Signal Processing Systems, Journal of Systems Architecture, and INTEGRATION, the VLSI Journal.
In 1986 he received the "Dissertation Award" of the Technical University of Munich, in 1987, the "Outstanding Young Author Award" of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, in 1988, the Browder J. Thompson Memorial Award of the IEEE, and in 2000-2001, the "IBM Faculty Partnership Award". In 2004, he joined the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Honorary Blaise Pascal Chair of University Leiden, The Netherlands. Since 2009 he is a member of the Foundation Board of Hasler Foundation, Switzerland. Since 2010, he is a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2013, he joined the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.