Annual Campbell Lecture 2007

The University hosted its 4th Campbell Lecture "Wireless Sensing Systems: From ecosystems to human systems" on Tuesday, May 1st 2007. The speaker was Professor Deborah Estrin of the University of California, Los Angeles. The lecture was jointly sponsored by WiSET (Women in Science, Engineering and Technology) and the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The focus of Professor Estrin's lecture was on the way that sensing, computation and wireless communications have been combined in integrated, low-power devices, and networks of these devices embedded in the physical world.

'Looking back over the past few years we have made significant progress towards the vision of programmable, multi-modal, multi-scale, and multi-use observatories,' she said. 'We have made our greatest strides in these applications using judicious application of server-side and in situ processing, mobility at multiple scales, and multi-scale data and models as context for in situ measurements.' Professor Estrin considered how these lessons and new technologies are now being applied to humans as well as natural systems, in particular by exploring use of the installed base of image and acoustic sensors that we all carry around with us - our mobile phones.

Professor Deborah Estrin holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks at UCLA and is Founding Director of the NSF-fundedCenter for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). She has recently been awarded a 2007 Woman of Vision Award by the Anita Borg Institute.

Campbell lecture 2007

Photograph, from left to right: Professor Jane Hart, Professor Bill Wakeham, Professor Deborah Estrin, Professor Philippa Reed