From stationary and mobile sensors, to embedded/real-time devices, to PDAs and laptops, to parallel/cluster systems, to wide-area distributed computing via the Internet, there is a continuum of computing, communication, and interaction capabilities all around us. It is clear that future computing and communication infrastructures should no longer be looked upon simply as standalone vehicles for number crunching, problem solving, or information transfer. Instead, future systems should be constructed with the assumption that they exist in a highly connected and constantly changing world, where machines, devices, and networking technologies work in concert to help the average individual use the underlying hardware/software infrastructure with as little instruction as possible.
This seminar is to explore distributed systems mechanisms (both classical, and novel ones) in the context of this continuum. Topics to be covered include novel smart sensing hardware; programming idioms, runtime systems, and networking support for adaptive distributed computing with sensors; and building blocks for embedded processing using such sensors.