SenSys 2007

Greetings from Australia! I flew down to Sydney a few days ago for SenSys 2007. Visiting Sydney has been a strange experience, but the purpose of this post will be to summarize some information from the conference itself.

The keynote speaker for the conference was Seth Goldstein. The title of his talk was "On the Path Towards Programmable Matter." At first a lot of his thoughts and ideas sounded like a bunch of science fiction (see this video used in his talk). However, he then proceeded to show prototypes for the ideas! I thought this was an excellent keynote and look forward to hearing more about this area in the future. For now, you can look at the claytronics website.

The "best paper" award for the conference went to Tracking Mobile Nodes Using RF Doppler Shifts. Apparently it stood out above all the other submissions through multiple reviews. The work does seem really neat, since there are a number of things which immediately come to mind about how one would think this is a bad idea.

The "best talk" award for the conference went to CargoNet: A Low-Cost MicroPower Sensor Node Exploiting Quasi-Passive Wakeup for Adaptive Asynchronous Monitoring of Exceptional Events. This work also seems really neat, and the presentation was pretty good. Here is the website.

I presented our work on Safe TinyOS on the second day of the conference. The presentation went well, if I say so myself. I could have handled the questions a bit better, but I also could have handled them much worse too. Dave Culler is anxious to push Safe TinyOS into the main TinyOS distribution and calling it TinyOS 2.1. I have a feeling that is going to be a lot of pain coming in my direction, but it is still cool.

Look at the conference program for more information about which talks and presentations were given.