Topic
Large-Scale Data Collection for Human Contact Network Research

Speaker
Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmid, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

Time/Location
Friday January 24th, 11:30, Room -120, Building 50.34

Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have come a long way to reach their ubiquitous state known today through scalable cost, low-power optimizations, and data management. As WSNs scale in size, the necessity for system designs - from low-level hardware implementations to data collection and management procedures - to account for handling extensive amounts of data is crucial. Several prominent papers address these issues for limited deployments of less than 200 nodes, but there are little resources available for multiple consecutive deployments of over 500 nodes.

This talk will go over the engineering perspective on sensor data collection, management, and processing while collaborating with epidemiologists for the Wireless Ranging Enabled Node (WREN) network system for human contact research. The WRENs completed 13 deployments over a period of 8 months to mine over 35 million contact points. We present our design considerations, challenges, experiences, and will present how the hardware will scale down in size to cubic-mm sensing nodes.

Short Bio
Dr. Thomas Schmid received his M.Sc. in Communication Systems Engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in 2005, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009 respectively. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah since 2011, and is currently the director of the Wireless and Embedded Sensing Systems Lab (WiESEL). His academic work has won numerous awards, including 4 best paper awards, 2 student design competitions, plus the UCLA Electrical Engineering 2009-2010 Outstanding PhD award. His current research on social interaction of school-aged children won the best demo award at ACM SenSys 2012.

Dr. Schmid is also the co-founder and CEO at Greina Technologies, a startup specializing in RF ranging technologies.

Photos from the talk