cfaed Seminar Series

cfaed Seminar Series

Jan Rabaey (Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professor) , UC Berkeley

The Human Intranet – Where Swarms and Humans Meet

23.11.2015 (Monday) , 10:00 - 11:30
TU Dresden, Werner-Hartmann-Building, Room 205 , Nöthnitzer Str. 66 , 01187 Dresden

Prof. Jan Rabaey

Some of most compelling application domains of the IoT and Swarm concepts relate to how humans interact with the world around it and the cyberworld beyond. While the proliferation of communication and data processing devices has profoundly altered our interaction patterns, little has been changed in the way we process inputs (sensory) and outputs (actuation). The combination of IoT (Swarms) and wearable devices offers the potential for changing all of this. Yet, realizing full potential requires that a number of barriers are overcome, most notably the non-scalable nature of the current deployments.


The Human Intranet proposes an open scalable platform that seamlessly integrates an ever-increasing number of sensor, actuation, computation, storage, communication and energy nodes located on, in, or around the human body acting in symbiosis with the functions provided by the body itself. The traditional set of senses and interactions is to be augmented by a set of new capabilities, some of which might be hard to even imagine today. .

This presentation explores the opportunities and challenges in realizing the Human Intranet, and illustrates these with some actual examples from the domain of brain-machine interfaces. Special attention will be paid to the computational needs posed by the Intranet, and a discussion of how they could be addressed.

About the speaker: Prof. Jan Rabaey is the founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center and the Ubiquitous Swarm Lab. He has been on the forefront of many groundbreaking innovations in low-energy design, and is currently exploring the interaction between information technology and neuroscience.

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