Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Mobility and Resource Management in Smart Home Environments

Abstract

Rapid advances in sensors, wireless mobile networks and pervasive computing technologies have set the stage for the development of smart environments. Context-awareness is perhaps the most salient feature in such environments, and user location plays a vital role in defining the contexts. Thus it is extremely important to design scalable, technology independent, location-aware services to demonstrate best performance and efficacy of smart environments.

In this talk, we will first characterize smart environments and the desired goals. Then we will develop an agent based architecture for smart homes, followed by an information theory based predictive framework for inhabitant's mobility tracking and location-aware resource optimization. The underlying idea is to capture inhabitant's spatio-temporal movement (location) profiles from sensors in the symbolic domain, store them in a compressed dictionary to help learn such profiles, and predict with good accuracy the inhabitant's future mobility patterns (location as well as the most likely routes). The framework is rich enough to be applied to other contexts, such as successful prediction of inhabitant's activity sequence and resource needs, thus leading to pro-active and near-optimal resource (e.g., scarce wireless bandwidth) management schemes and on-demand operations of automated devices along the inhabitant's future locations and paths. Simulation and real experiments will corroborate high prediction success and sufficient reduction in daily energy-consumption and manual device operations.

(This research is funded by the US National Science Foundation.)

Biography

Dr. Sajal K. Das received B.Tech. degree in 1983 from Calcutta University, M.S. degree in 1984 from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and PhD degree in 1988 from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, all in Computer Science. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and also the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). His current research interests include resource and mobility management in wireless and sensor networks, mobile and pervasive computing, wireless multimedia and QoS provisioning, mobile Internet protocols, distributed processing and grid computing. He has published over 350 research papers, directed numerous funded projects, and holds 5 US patents in wireless mobile networks. He received the Best Paper Awards in ACM MobiCom'99, ICOIN'01, ACM MSWIM'00, and ACM/IEEE PADS'97. He is also a recipeint of UTA's University Award for Distinguished Record of Research (2005), College of Engineering Research Excellence Award (2003), and Outstanding Faculty Research Award in Computer Science (2001 and 2003). He is frequently invited as a keynote or invited speaker at international conferences. He is the coauthor of a book "Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols and Applications", published in 2005 by John Wiley.

Dr. Das is the Editor-in-Chief of Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal, ans serves on the Editorial Boards of 5 international journals including IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks. He has served as General Chair of IEEE WoWMoM'05, IWDC'04, IEEE PerCom'04, CIT'03 and IEEE MASCOTS'02; General Vice Chair of IEEE PerCom'03, ACM MobiCom'00 and HiPC'00-01; Program Chair of IWDC'02, WoWMoM'98-99; TPC Vice Chair of CIT'05, ICPADS'02; and as TPC member of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. He is the Vice Chair of IEEE Technnical Committees (TCPP and TCCC), and on the Advisory Boards of several cutting-edge companies.