Colleen Josephson
Enabling sustainable sensor networks with RF backscatter
Abstract
We need affordable and innovative sensing to assist in tackling global-scale problems like sustainably feeding the next billion. RF backscatter systems such as RFID are well-known in the sensing community because of their low power consumption. This talk explores how we can enable robust indoor/outdoor RF-backscatter sensing by leveraging advances in low-power embedded systems. It will describe the challenges faced in low-power and sustainable sensor networks, and provide an overview of an outdoor radar backscatter sensing system that uses RF to measure soil moisture with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art commercial sensors, but at a fraction of the cost. Also to be discussed is recent work on renewably powering outdoor sensor systems via energy harvested from non-traditional sources like microbes.
Biography
Colleen Josephson is an Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz, where she leads the , and is actively recruiting PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Her research interests include wireless communication and sensing systems, with a focus on technologies to enable and improve sustainable practices. Her work includes designing novel sensing paradigms for agriculture, inventing techniques for ultra-low power communication in indoor sensor networks, and exploiting non-traditional energy sources, such as microbes, for sustainable sensing. Colleen completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Before beginning her PhD, she worked at Cisco Meraki as a wireless engineer, and even before that she received her SB and MEng degrees from MIT. In 2022, she was recognized as a Rising Star in Computer Networking and Communications and appointed as an associate editor for .
