In-situ Research Using Connected Devices: Challenges and Opportunities

An increasing number of research areas rely on collecting data from sensors and devices deployed in homes and beyond. Researchers typically deploy such devices, collect data, analyze and make interesting inferences based on this data. In order to collecting sufficient data to have confidence in the research findings it is desirable to collect data from a large numbers of locations. However, doing so requires major investment in engineering expertise and technology infrastructure; both not readily available to the academic community. Microsoft Research’s Lab of Things aims to provide such an infrastructure to facilitate at-scale in-situ research in a number of research areas. In this session, academic researchers deploying studies using the Lab of Things will provide overview of their in-situ research and lessons learnt while deploying such studies

Speaker Details

Arjmand Samuel works with the academic community to foster research and collaborations in the devices and services research areas. He leads the mobile and cloud computing research and outreach for Microsoft Research (Project Hawaii and TouchDevelop). His recent research interests are in software architectures and programming paradigms for devices of all shapes and forms (TouchDevelop and HomeOS). He has published in a variety of publications on topics of security, privacy, location aware access control, and innovative use of mobile technology. Samuel has a Ph.D. in Information Security from Purdue University.

Nilanjan Banerjee is an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is a 2011 NSF Career Awardee and a 2013 Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovations Awardee. He received the Yahoo! outstanding dissertation award and the best undergraduate thesis award at IIT Kharagpur. His research interests lie in the intersection of sensor hardware design and embedded software system design. He has received best paper nominations at BuildSys 2012 and Pervasive 2010 and a best paper award at ACM Homenets 2011.

Affan A. Syed is an Associate Professor at the EE department and leads the SysNet lab at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES), Pakistan. His research interest spans a wide spectrum; from exploring the deep linkages between sensing and energy in cyber-physical systems to embedded systems, computer security, and SmartBuildings. He received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2004 and 2009 respectively. He is a member of ACM and IEEE, and part of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor society.”