The lofty vision of the wireless sensor network research when it started more than a decade ago was to blanket the planet with tiny, self-organizing smart dust. Each dust particle has a little bit of sensing, computation and communication, with some onboard energy reserve. When released in the ambience, the smart dust collaborates to sense and possibly act on the physical world and its inhabitants, for a variety of societal scale problems such as environment, energy, health, and mobility. Now, with the advent of the increasingly more capable sensors on widely available platforms such as cell phones and vehicles, the age of planet-scale sensor networks has finally arrived.This new generation of mobile sensing systems leverage storage and processing on both mobile devices and in the cloud. Furthermore, the ability to crowd-source the sensing and action with users in the loop presents new opportunities as well as raising issues of privacy and security. In this talk, I will first give a brief review of the major advances in sensor networks to date. The rest of the talk will be on mobile sensing, including sensing a person’s physiological state, mapping out noise in the environment, and understanding human mobility patterns for better urban planning.

Feng is an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia, responsible for the hardware, mobile and sensing, software analytics, systems and networking research areas. His own research has focused on wireless sensor networks, energy-efficient computing, and mobile systems. Prior to joining MSR-Asia in 2009, he was a Principal Researcher at MSR Redmond (2004-2009), and founded the Networked Embedded Computing Group that has designed and deployed sensor networks at several Microsoft datacenters for environmental monitoring and energy optimization. He was a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC 1997-2004, and founded PARC’s sensor network effort.

Feng has championed the wireless sensor network and energy-efficient computing research at Microsoft. He was among the first to develop a suite of collaborative sensing and processing protocols for tracking problems using networked sensors, including the IDSQ algorithm. He authored or co-authored over 100 technical papers and books, including a book, Wireless Sensor Networks: An information processing approach, by Morgan Kaufmann. He was the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (2003-2010), and founded the ACM/IEEE IPSN conference. In 2008, he helped start a new workshop, HotPower, focusing on the emerging topic of sustainable computing.

Feng received a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, and taught at Ohio State University and Stanford University. An IEEE Fellow, Feng received a Sloan Research Fellowship (1994) and NSF and ONR Young Investigator Awards (1994, 1997).

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