[Colloq] Hiring Visit: Shwetak Patel

[Patricia Freeman]

Shwetak Patel joins us for a Hiring Visit TODAY.
His Talk will take place in 366 WVH at 12 noon.


                   CCIS Colloquium/Hiring Talk


     Bringing Sensing to the Masses: An Exploration in Infrastructure
                         Mediated Sensing

                         Shwetak Patel
          School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing
                  Georgia Institute of Technology

                     Friday, May 9, 2008
                   12:00 noon, Room 366 WVH

The use of sensing systems in the home has the potential to impact various
research areas such as chronic care management, aging in place, and
sustainability.  A major challenge remains in identifying and developing
truly ubiquitous sensing solutions that address deployment challenges of
cost-effectiveness, installation, maintenance, and overall acceptability for
a general audience. In the home, the goal of practical ubiquity had led me
to develop a new sensing approach, which I call "Infrastructure Mediated
Sensing," or IMS. Infrastructure mediation refers to the simple augmentation
and probing of existing home infrastructure, such as the electrical power
lines, plumbing, or HVAC systems, to sense human activity. I will present
three different IMS systems I have built that leverage the electrical and
HVAC systems in a home for the purposes of location tracking and activity
detection. I will describe an in-depth study of home mobility patterns
enabled by an IMS-based positioning system, as well as motivate a wide
variety of other applications this sensing approach enables. I will also
describe research opportunities in exploring IMS outside of the domestic
space.


Shwetak N. Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science in the School of
Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is a
member of the Ubiquitous Computing Research group, serves as the assistant
director of the Aware Home Research Initiative, and is a National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research is in the areas of
Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing with a particular
emphasis on developing and applying new low-cost, easy-to-use hardware and
software solutions to enable novel application deployment and evaluation.
Shwetak's published work has received various best paper awards and
nominations. His past work on camera detection and neutralization received
the designation of a Top Technology Idea of the Year from New York Times
Magazine in 2005. In 2007, he was named the Georgia Tech College of
Computing Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant. Shwetak's research has
also been the basis of various commercialization efforts.