Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Speaker: Professor Michael Zink
Title: Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere: System-driven Design, Implementation, Operation and Research

CASA is a NSF funded Engineering Research Center that seeks to revolutionize our ability to observe, understand, predict, and respond to hazardous weather by creating distributed collaborative adaptive sensing (DCAS) networks that sample the atmosphere where and when end-user needs are greatest.

In this presentation, I will give an overview of IP1, the first DCAS testbed. This 4-node test bed, which has been operational since June 2006, is installed in southwestern Oklahoma and covers a region of 7000 square km that receives an average of four tornado warnings and 53 thunderstorm warnings a year.

First of all the system architecture of this DCAS system will be presented. This includes the sensing nodes, the communication infrastructure, and the central node, which hosts the Meteorological Command & Control (MC&C) architecture. The MC&C is the heart of the DCAS system, which ingests data from the four radars, identifies meteorological features in this data, and determines each radar’s scan strategy based on detected features and end-user requirements. Every 1-minute heartbeat, the MC&C ingests processed sensor data to generate meteorological features which might be of interest to the system end-users. These features are then clustered together and posited as potential three-dimensional scanning tasks. Novel optimization techniques that consider the preferences of different end-user groups then determine the actual targeting of the radars. Next to the overall DCAS architecture results from its performance evaluation in the actual IP1 test bed will be presented. I will also give a quick overview on the systems engineering process used to design and implement this test bed.

In the second part of my talk I will highlight results from my research on long-distance 802.11 networks. CASA students have come up with a concept of Off-the-Grid (OTG) radar networks. These networks consist of radars that are independent of gridded power and wired network access. Long-distance 802.11 wireless networks are one alternative to establish communication links to these OTG nodes. I will present results from measurement studies performed in such
networks which can be used as guidelines for the installation and management of such networks. Finally, I will show how this measurement work led me to investigate the performance and quality of wireless packet sniffers.

Bio:
Michael Zink is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He also serves as CASA's Deputy Director for Technical Integration where he manages an interdisciplinary team of meteorologists, electrical engineers, social scientists and computer scientists. He works in the fields of sensor networks and long-distance 802.11 wireless networks. Further research interests are in sensor network virtualization, wide-area multimedia distribution for wired and wireless environments, network measurements, and systems engineering. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. degree (Dr.-Ing.) from Darmstadt University of Technology. His thesis was on "Scalable Internet Video-on-Demand Systems".

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Speaker: Professor Wayne Burleson
Title: Who's Afraid of RFID?

Abstract:
When I was an undergrad at MIT in the late 1970's, microelectronics was still young and Silicon Valley was a magical land on the other side of the country. Chip design was a new frontier that was predicted to improve our quality of life and required a judicious blend of circuit design, computer architecture, programming, and generic engineering skills.

Three decades later, microelectronics impacts most aspects of our lives, and many chips are designed by huge teams of engineers each with very specific roles and capabilities. Most recently , Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), very small battery-free circuits, are used to widely deploy computing in a tiny wireless package that can be embedded almost anywhere.
RFID design involves energy harvesting, RF design, very lightweight cryptography and sensors, and custom design approaches that tightly interact requiring highly skilled but small multi-disciplinary teams. RFID technology has also raised many concerns about the ethics, security and privacy policies around ubiquitous computing.

This talk will take a look behind the curtain of RFID, hopefully dispelling some myths but still leaving plenty of unanswered questions.

Bio:
Burleson teaches and develops methods and tools for chip design and microelectronic systems. He has been at UMass since 1990. His current research involves two thrusts:
1) variation-aware design, including circuits and systems which sense and adapt to variations due to manufacturing, supply voltage, temperature and various failure and wearout mechanisms.
2) security-aware design including RFID, lightweight security primitives, hardware threat models, side-channel attacks and hardware trojans.

Friday, 5 December 2008
Live Demonstration of Self-playing Arduino-controlled Pneumatically-powered Snare Drum
By Professor J. Boyle

Born in Pittsburgh in 1975, artist/musician Jeremy Boyle received his BFA from
the University of Illinois at Chicago and MFA from The Ohio State University. He
was a founding member of the Chicago group Joan of Arc and has performed music
(both solo and collaborative) extensively throughout the United States, Canada
and Japan and his recordings are internationally distributed. He has exhibited
artwork, most of which is sound and technology based, in major cities across the
U.S. including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Sacramento, Seattle,
Miami, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He was awarded the PA Council on the Arts
Fellowship in 2003, received the Heinz Creative Heights Award and completed a
residency at the Mattress Factory in 2004, and received a Sprout Fund Seed Award
in 2005-6. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Hudson Franklin Gallery
in New York City and Deadtech Gallery in Chicago. He is currently an Assistant
Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More information
can be found at: www.jeremyboyle.com.

Tuesday, 18 November 2008
Chasing Interdisciplinarity while Chasing Tornadoes:
The CASA Engineering Research Center
By Professor D. McLaughlin

UMass leads the CASA project, which is an international effort to advance our
ability to observe, understand, predict, and respond to hazardous weather events
like tornadoes and flash floods. Part technical, part human interest, this
lecture provides an end-to-end overview of this project and shows how a group of
engineers with money, partners, hard work, and a good idea can lead a
technological revolution.

Friday, 14 Nobvember 2008
Taking the Twinkle Out of Stars: Adaptive Optics in Astronomy
By Professor D. Looze

The earth’s atmosphere introduces aberrations to the image of an
astronomical object that is observed by a telescope. One manifestation of these
aberrations is our view of stars – they appear to vary in magnitude and to wobble (twinkle).
The objective of an adaptive optics system in astronomy is to reduce, as much as possible,
these aberrations. This talk will discuss the basics of astronomical imaging and the role
and potential of adaptive optics.

Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Cryptography, Car Crashes and Burglars
By Professor C. Paar

The long predicted age of pervasive computing has become reality. The vast
majority of microprocessors have been integrated in embedded systems (as opposed
to traditional interactive computers) for a long time. With the more recent
trend of connecting all these embedded applications, many exciting new
applications have become possible but at the same time new security
problems have appeared.

Many embedded systems will have security solutions, which are
different from, say, building firewalls for a corporate network. In contrast to
classical IT security, providing security for embedded devices is heavily dependent
on the target's hardware and software. For instance, performing a digital
signature can be a major challenge for an RFID bar code label. We will give an
overview about this emerging area. As case studies, we will discuss "network"
security for car-2-car communication and how to break into garages and automobiles.

Christof Paar has the Chair for Embedded Security at the University
Bochum, Germany, and is Research Professor at UMass Amherst. From 1994 to 2001
he was professor at WPI, Worchester, Massachusetts. He co-founded, with Cetin
Koc, the CHES (Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems) workshop series.
Prof. Paar's research interests cover fast software and hardware
realizations of cryptographic algorithms, RFID security, physical security, secure ad-
hoc networks, and cryptanalytical hardware. He also works on real-world applications
of embedded security, e.g.,in cars, consumer devices, and RFID. He is co-
founder of escrypt Embedded Security Inc., (escrypt.com) a leading consultancy
in applied security. Prof. Paar has over 80 peer-reviewed publications
in embedded security and holds several patents. He has given invited talks at MIT,
Yale, Stanford University, University of Illinois, IBM T.J. Watson Labs and Sun Labs
and many other places.

Friday, 25 April 2008
The iPhone as an Ultra-portable Computing Platform
By Prof. R. Mettu

In the last decade we have seen a revolution in both the size and performance of computing and communication devices. It would have been hard for us to imagine ten years ago that it would become commonplace for people to carry a powerful computer in their bag, and communicate from almost anywhere with a handheld device. Is it possible to combine computation and communication? It seems so, with the introduction of a number of handheld computing devices, most notably the Apple iPhone. In this talk I will discuss the basic hardware and software layout of the phone, which has been reverse engineered to a large part by the unsanctioned efforts of various hackers. I will also discuss how Apple has recently made software decisions that indicate that, in years to come, they will market the iPhone as an ultra-portable computing device.

Friday, 18 April 2008
Getting Beyond Devices: Using Your Degree from ECE for Solving Real World
Problems Like Climate Change
By Prof. P. Siqueira

The process of learning the field of electrical engineering involves becoming an expert on a variety of fields, ranging from applied physics, mathematics, signal processing and statistics, not to mention the more traditional circuits, solid state devices, computer programming, networking and computer systems. As undergraduates, it is often easy to get focused on the details of the learning process and the immediate goals associated with coursework, and in that process the bigger picture gets lost. In today's marketplace where economic trends on continental scales force much commercial development to occur overseas, it is becoming increasingly important to keep this big picture in mind, because that, ultimately, is where future opportunities and growth will be found. In this talk, Prof. Siqueira will talk about those components of the undergraduate education that fit into this paradigm, and his personal experiences in applying a technical background in electrical engineering to the multi-disciplinary questions associated with climate change.

Prof. Siqueira earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and his PhD from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1996 he worked with the Radar Science Engineering Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California. He was a Visiting Scientist at the European Commission's Joint Research Center unit for Global Vegetation Monitoring in Northern Italy in 2001-2002. He is a principal investigator for NASA's terrestrial ecology program and on the science team for the Japanese Space Agency's Kyoto and Carbon Cycle Initiative. He has been an associate professor at UMass since 2005, where his research interests are in the design, development and application of microwave remote sensing and microwave engineering for studying the environment.

Friday, 11 April 2008
The Arrow of Time: A Consideration of the Irreversibility of Time
By Prof. M. V. Fischetti

We can move back and forth, up and down, left and right, but we inexorably move only forward in time. Why? Even Einstein's relativity treats time differently from the start, giving distances in time a negative sign which spatial distances do not possess, but provides no explanation. It simply acknowledges it as a fact. Looking at the history of this question, the answer apparently depends on how we define time and what we mean by "unidirectional flow" (or "irreversibility"): Is time the psychological feeling that we have of its flow and irreversibility our inability to make memories "real"? Do we define time as the thermodynamic evolution which forces heat to flow from hot to warm bodies and never (?) in the opposite direction, thus causing an irreversible increase of the disorder (or "entropy")? Are we dealing with the irreversible processes postulated (long ago, by a few important people in Copenhagen) to occur when we make a measurement of a quantum system and cause its wavefunction to "collapse"? Or are the boundary conditions at the beginning and the end (however we define it…) of the Universe which ultimately determine the direction of the "arrow of time"?

      The discussion will start from introducing the "thermodynamic" time (presumably identical to our psychological time and the most important one, although sadly ignored by Steven Hawking in his popular "Brief History of Time"), looking at how giants figures of Physics have addressed the problem: From the tragic life of Ludwig Boltzmann (who killed himself, anguished by the controversy surrounding his work on this very issue) to the understated and obscure Lars Onsager and his "reciprocity relations" and to the controversial Ilya Prigogine with his speculation on the dynamic nature of the second law of thermodynamics based on chaos theory and fractals. This will lead to uncovering the connections of the concept of “irreversibility” with information and computational theory, touching on the never ending controversy about Landauer-Bennett’s irreversible computing and mentioning Charlie Bennett’s solution of the Maxwell demon’s paradox. Then we'll move to the interpretation of the act of measurement in Quantum Mechanics, its effect on irreversibility and to the various "decoherence" model (especially that by Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber) and, finally, to their connection to the cosmological time, as in the model by Gell-Mann and Hartle.

      Massimo Fischetti graduated in Physics from the University of Milan in 1974 with a thesis on the role of symmetries and conservation laws in quantum field theory. In 1978 he obtained his PhD degree in Physics at UCSB under the supervision of James Hartle on issues related to the stability of space-time worm-holes near charged but non-rotating (Reissner-Nordstrom) black holes and quantization of fields and particle creation in the early Robertson-Walker universe. All these efforts went wasted (apparently) as he moved to experimental Solid State Physics and started working on high-field electronic transport in insulators, semiconductors and semiconductor devices, using Monte Carlo techniques to solve the Boltzmann equation in sub-micron MOSFETs. This activity has kept him busy for more than 20 years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research center in Yorktown Heights, NY, and more recently at the ECE Department at UMass which he joined in 2005. His main interest is currently on the physics of semiconductor devices at the nanometer scale. Much to his amazement and amusement, understanding the equations which control the motion of electrons in a tiny device requires coming to grips with the problem of understanding where irreversibility enters the picture, consideration which loops back to the theoretical interests of his earlier life. It must be said that, despite his efforts to clarify the origin of irreversibility, prof. Fischetti has not managed to get any younger over the years.

Friday, 04 April 2008
Where am I? Operation of the Global Position System
By Prof. T. Wolf

      Being able to determine ones exact geographic location has many practical applications from navigation to agriculture. In this talk, I will briefly describe the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS). I will discuss GPS capabilities, accuracy, and limitations. I will also outline how modern GPS receivers can easily be integrated with microcontrollers and other embedded systems.

      Tilman Wolf is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are computer networks, router design, and embedded systems.