“That went well.”
I didn’t finish as much as I wanted. I took care of things related to the CompEd group book project, made good headway on finishing a lit review draft, and got kick-started on the post-doc work. We’ll continue the spirit of finishing season, and will not declare another until I’m really “finishing.” That, hopefully, will be Very Soon Now.
Which, for those of you abroad who might be interested in such things (Mark, Carrie’s Uncle Ron, others), I thought I’d expand on what’s recently come to pass. The project I’ll be working on is in the field of sensor networks—this is an emerging field that explores how to balance the power requirements, communication overheads, and limitations of small computing devices to harvest information from the world around us. In the extreme case, the goal is to be able to have “smart dust” that can report all kinds of conditions, whether it is microclimate in the world or in buildings, personal health, security, or any other task where many, small sensors working together may give us a better picture than one monolithic sensor.
The twist, or focus, to this work involves the application of hardware and software co-design; developing systems where we are able to evolve not only the programs that run the sensor nodes, but the hardware as well. Of course, the goal is to specify these designs at as high a level as possible—in pictures, if you will—and automatically convert those high-level descriptions into software and hardware. And, have the design and implementation of one influence, positively, the design and implementation of the other.
Tricky.
However, my characterization of the project may change over time, but that’s what I understand at this moment. Therefore, I’ve probably got the details and the big picture wrong; however, I do know that it brings together a number of my own interests and skills, and should present a good challenge.
Carrie and I are excited to stay in the UK for a few more years, and would like to do some more traveling in the meantime. More visitors would be good, too. So, we’re in our little apartment for now, but may yet move… we’ll have to see.