He is the founder Director and Principal Investigator of the Research ... In the past his research has been funded by EPSRC, US Office of Naval Research, ...
Keynote Speaker D K Arvind School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, SCOTLAND
Biography DK Arvind is a Reader in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, and CITRIS Visiting Professor at the University of California, at Berkeley (2007-11). He was previously for four years a Research Scientist in the School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He is the founder Director and Principal Investigator of the Research Consortium in Speckled Computing (www.specknet.org) - a multidisciplinary grouping of computer scientists, electronic engineers, electrochemists and physicists drawn from five universities, to research the next generation of miniature wireless sensor networks. The Consortium has attracted research funding in the excess of L5.2 Million (~US$ 10 million) (2004-10) from the Scottish Funding Council, and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the US). In the past his research has been funded by EPSRC, US Office of Naval Research, Scottish Enterprise/Cadence Design Systems, Sharp, Hitachi, Panasonic/Mastushita, Agilent, ARM and SUN Microsystems. His research interests include the design, analysis and integration of miniature networked embedded systems which combine sensing, processing and wireless networking capabilities.
Abstract Specknet Infrastructure for Cyber-Physical Systems In an iconic sequence in the 1930's film "Modern Times" - a commentary on the banality and boredom of life on an industrial production line, Charlie Chaplin is seen working on a conveyer belt, trapped in an endless loop of repetitive actions. In more recent times, the human on the conveyer belt has been replaced by robots corralled in their own pens, and their interaction with the human is a distant one, if at all. The vision of the future is altogether different: robots and humans living cheek by jowl and interacting as part of a wider Cyber-Physical System. The talk will explore the fabric of such as a system based on specknets: wireless sensors on the human for real-time motion capture is networked wirelessly with humanoid robots to provide unprecedented levels of flexibility and freedom in real-time interactions. The resulting "physical avatar" acts as a physical presence, either near or afar, taking the place of the human operator for purposes of communication, exploration and object manipulation in collaboration with other such robots or humans. An in-built online learning and classification system allows motions of a human operator to be learned by the robot. We discuss whether everyday use of a motion-capture physical avatar may eventually provide enough training data to adequately prepare robots for autonomous operation. The talk will be interspersed with videos of the implementation of the infrastructure.
