Brad Campbell

Assistant Professor

University of Virginia

Abstract

The promise and hype of the Internet of Things stems from its scale—a vast number of devices spanning various modalities, networks, spaces, and domains enabling data-driven decisions in a suite of applications. This scale, however, comes at the cost of increased energy consumption, increased hardware requirements, and an increased potential for e-waste. To enable scalability while promoting sustainability, we need new system-level techniques to promote device longevity, reuse, and futureproofing. In this talk, we will discuss our efforts on energy-harvesting, device retrofitting, and edge networks to enable embedded ecosystems with long lifetimes designed to improve our built environment. We will share a new energy-harvesting architecture designed to lower the barrier to building self-powered devices and encourage more energy-harvesting devices. We will then show how that platform enables existing devices to be upgraded and augmented, rather than removed and replaced, when application needs change. To complement the hardware, we will describe a new embedded operating system that enables robust application updates, and a new spin on edge computing that leverages existing ambient compute resources. These new systems converge in the Living Link Lab, a heavily instrumented testbed at UVA for cutting-edge smart buildings research.

Biography

Brad Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Link Lab at UVA, a cross-disciplinary research lab focused on cyber-physical systems. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 2017, and his B.S. in Computer Engineering also from the University of Michigan. His research concentrates on designing low-power, self-powered, and resilient wireless smart devices and networks that are fault tolerant, privacy-preserving, and scalable, with applications in smart buildings and smart cities. His work has led to numerous open-source hardware and software platforms, and his work on self-powered energy meters is currently being commercialized. Brad received an NSF CAREER award in 2022, and a best paper award at DFHS’19. Brad has served on the organizing and technical program committees of numerous conferences, including MobiCom, SenSys, IPSN, BuildSys, and MobiSys.