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Kamin Whitehouse
Assistant Professor |
The overarching goal of my research is to reduce the effort required to build Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), which are an emerging class of computer systems that use sensing, intelligence, and control to bridge the gap between the cyber- and physical-worlds.
My work addresses a range of issues surrounding hardware, software, and applications, but most projects fall into one of two main thrusts. The first and dominant thrust is programming and debugging of wireless embedded networks. The second is an application thrust that began a few years ago: energy efficient smart buildings.
Recent News
| Vijay Srinivasan defended his Ph.D. and is headed to Samsung's pervasive computing group, December, 2011 |
| CBC Radio interview with Jie Liu and I, November, 2011 |
| Ginger Smith received honorable mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. November, 2011 |
| Andreas Terzis and I are organizing the IPSN 2012 Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks for April, 2010 |
| Turn On the Server. It's Cold Inside. Nov 26, 2011 |
| Trane is funding our research on occupancy sensing in commercial buildings. November, 2011 |
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| Rajesh Gupta and I organized the BuildSys 2011 Workshop On Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings. November, 2011 |
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| Jiakang Lu defended his Ph.D. and is headed to Microsoft Azure. November, 2011 |
| Jargon Watch: Pitstops, War-Texting, Data Furnace. Nov 1, 2011 |
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| Tim Hnat defended his Ph.D. and is headed to U. Memphis. October, 2011 |
| Pedro Marron and I organized the EWSN 2011 European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks. October, 2011 |
| Steamy Cloud Servers Installed In Homes and Businesses Could Be Used As Furnaces. July 25, 2011 |
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| ACM TechNews email covered the Data Furnace. August 1, 2011 |
| Microsoft Suggests Heating Homes With "Data Furnaces". July 26, 2011 |
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| Why Waste Servers' Heat?. July 23, 2011 |
| Will Your Next Furnace Be A Server Farm? July 2010 |
| "Data Furnace" Would Heat Homes While Flipping Bits. July 25, 2011 |
| How to heat your home with a data furnace. July 29, 2011 |
| Microsoft suggests heating your home with Data Furnaces. July 26, 2011 |
| Data furnace idea warms homes, crunches bits and bytes. July 25, 2011 |
| Cloud computing is a lot of hot air (and it can heat your house). July 25, 2011 |
| Where There's Smoke, There's a Signal. June, 2011 |
| "Breadcrumb" Routers Are A Firefighter's New Best Friend. June, 2011 |
| Tracking And Rescuing Firefighters With Disposable "Bread Crumb" Routers. June 23, 2011 |
| Wireless 'Breadcrumbs' That Won't Become Toast When Baked...or Soggy When Hosed. June, 2011 |
| U.Va. Researchers Secure $2 Million National Science Foundation Grant to Smart Energy Systems. September, 2010 |
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UVa gets grant for 'smart building' research. Sept, 2010 |
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'Smart building' team earns grant. September 24, 2010 |
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Our energy conservation project was on the evening news (video). September, 2010 |
| The NSF funded our work on smart buildings. July, 2010 |
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| The NSF funded our work on body sensor networks. July, 2010 |
| Tamim Sookoor was awarded the SMART fellowship. June, 2010 |
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| The NSF funded our work on run-time assurance. May, 2010 |
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| Tamim Sookoor passed the Ph.D. proposal defense. May, 2010 |
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| Jing Yang passed the Ph.D. proposal defense. March, 2010 |
| Jiakang Lu accepted an internship at Philips Research. October, 2009 |
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| The NSF funded my CAREER proposal on MacroLab. January, 2009 |
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| Sensing the 'Ground Truth'. July 10, 2007 |
| An eye on downtown merchants?. July, 2007 |
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| The NSF funded our research on dynamic binary translation for sensor networks. August, 2008 |
| Microsoft Research funded my research on embedded debugging. August, 2007 |
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| The NSF funded our research on dynamic binary translation for embedded devices. August, 2007 |
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| Microsoft Research funded our research on the Internet of Things. August, 2007 |
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| I was awarded the UVa Excellence in Diversity Fellowship. September, 2006 |
| I was awarded the Siebel Foundation fellowship. September, 2005 |
| I was awarded the UC Bekeley GOF fellowship. September, 2004 |
| I was awarded the NDSEG graduate fellowship. September, 2000 |
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| I was awarded the NSF graduate fellowship. September, 2000 |
| I was awarded the James Dickson Carr 4-year scholarship. September, 1996 |
Selected Projects
 Smart Buildings for Energy Conservation We are creating smart
building technology to improve building efficiency by using
information about occupant locations and activities. Preliminary
results using data from 8 homes indicate that our approach can save
28% of HVAC energy with only $25 in sensors. Ongoing research is
extending these results several ways.
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 The Data Furnace In joint work with Microsoft researchers, we propose installing
servers into homes, apartment buildings, and office buildings, and to
use the exhaust heat as a primary heat source for the building. We
call this the Data Furnace. This approach saves energy, saves
money, and improves performance of Web applications.
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 Programming and
Debugging Cyber-Physical System we have created an evolving series
of tools for programming, debugging, testing, and analyzing
Cyber-physical systems to make software both easier to create and more
reliable. Major results include: 1) a macroprogramming system that
enables scientists to control a CPS with simple programs in a
Matlab-like syntax 2) low-level debuggers that manage the resouce
constraints of wireless embedded networks 3) new program analysis
techniques that can address the {\em path explosion} problem of
interrupt-driven embedded software.
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 MacroLab allows a user to write a single
macroprogram for an entire Cyber-Physical System. It is the first system that
can perform automatic, topology-specific decomposition of programs describing
parallel operations on parallel data structures. More...
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 Clairvoyant is the first comprehensive
source-level debugger for WSNs. It provides standard debugging
commands, including break, step, watch, and
backtrace as well as new, special-purpose commands that deal
with interrupts, conditional breakpoints, and new global
commands such as gstop and gcontinue. More...
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 We demonstrated
that we can eavesdrop on wireless devices in a home and extract
private information, even when all of the wireless data is encrypted,
with a Fingerprint and Timing-based
Snooping attack, or a FATS attack.
Experiments on four houses demonstrate that we can infer when and how
often the bathroom and kitchen are visited, when the person is
sleeping, and when the home is occupied with 90-100\% accuracy. More...
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 MetroNet The MetroNet project will consist of sensors deployed in the storefront windows of downtown Charlottesville. The sensors can be used by the store owners, city customers, city planners, real estate customers, etc. More...
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 The Flash
flooding protocol exploits the capture effect to reduce flooding latency by
allowing nodes to propagate the flood simultaneously, thereby eliminating
neighborhood contention. Our results indicate that Flash can reduce latency by
as much as 80%, achieving flooding latencies near the theoretical lower bound
without sacrificing coverage, reliability or power consumption.More... |
 Marionette is a development
tool for wireless embedded networks. It provides a tight coupling
between the program running on the wireless nodes and a python user
environment, so that the programmer can call functions and read/write
variables on the nodes from within a python shell or script. This
provides unprecedented run-time visibility and control for wireless
embedded devices, and can be used to rapid application prototyping
and/or debugging. More...
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 Hood is the first
neighborhood-based programming abstraction for sensor networks. It
performs neighbor discovery, neighbor list management, and data
sharing automatically, allowing the programmer to access the data
values of neighboring nodes through a Get/Set interface, instead of
through messaging protocols. More...
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Semantic Streams is a system that allows people to pose
semantic queries over sensor data. It produces logical
interpretations of data, in contrast to most query systems which
produce the data itself or mathematical aggregations of the data,
e.g. the user queries for the number of cars or trucks that pass
through an intersection instead of raw magnetometer values. More...
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 This is the first collision detection scheme for wireless
networks. This scheme can 1) differentiate between packet loss due to
collisions vs. bad link quality 2) identify the nodes that caused the
colllision 3) recover one of the packets from the collision. Until
now, all wireless MAC protocols assumed that collision detection was
not possible. More....
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 This work in
localization has several components, including hardware for acoustic
and ultrasonic ranging, collections of acoustic, ultrasound, and RSSI
ranging data from multiple different environments, a simulator called
"silhouette" that simulates a localization deployment given an
empirical ranging profile, and quantitative comparisons of
localization with different models of ranging, different algorithms,
and different environments. More...
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 In the pursuer-evader game (PEG), a vehicle (the
evader) is driven through a sensor field that tracks its location and
routes it to another device (the pursuer) that tries to autonomously
capture the evader. In August 2005, we deployed PEG using passive
infrared (PIR) sensors to track any moving object in an area covering
50,000 square meters with over 550 solar-powered sensor nodes. More...
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This
sensor network calibration technique allows each node to calibrate its
sensor using the actuators of its neighbors. This creates an
over-constrained system from which calibration coefficients can be
inferred even in the face of some noise from both the sensors and
actuators. More...
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Selected Publications
Jiakang Lu, Kamin Whitehouse. SunCast: Fine-grained Prediction of Natural Sunlight Levels. To appear in The 11th ACM Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'12). April 16-20, 2012, Beijing, China.
(15% acceptance rate)
Timothy Hnat, Vijay Srinivasan, Jiakang Lu, Tamim Sookoor, Raymond Dawson, John Stankovic, Kamin Whitehouse. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Successful Residential Sensing Deployments. The 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensing Systems (SenSys'11). November 2-4, 2011, Seattle, WA. (ppt)
(19.5% acceptance rate)
Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Sean James, Christian Belady, Jiakang Lu, Kamin Whitehouse. The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing. The 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'11). Jun 14-15, 2011. Portland, OR.
Jing Yang, Kevin Skadron, Mary Lou Soffa, and Kamin Whitehouse. Feasibility of Dynamic Binary Parallelization. The 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar'11). May 26-27, 2011 Berkeley, CA.
Jiakang Lu, Tamim Sookoor, Vijay Srinivasan, Gao Ge, Brian Holben, John Stankovic, Eric Field, Kamin
Whitehouse. The Smart Thermostat: Using Occupancy Sensors to Save Energy in Homes. The 8th
ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensing Systems (SenSys). November 3-5, 2010, Zurich, Switzerland. (ppt)
(17% acceptance rate)
Hengchang Liu, Jingyuan Li, Zhiheng Xie, Shan Lin, Kamin
Whitehouse, John A. Stankovic, David Siu. Automatic and Robust Breadcrumb
System Deployment for Indoor Firefighter Applications. The 8th
Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and
Services (MobiSys). June 15-18, 2010, San Francisco, CA, USA.
(20% acceptance rate)
Yafeng Wu, Krasimira Kapitanova, Jingyuan Li, John A. Stankovic, Sang H. Son,
and Kamin Whitehouse. Run Time Assurance
of Application-level Requirements in Wireless Sensor Networks.
The 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor
Networks (IPSN '10). Stockholm, Sweden, April 12-16, 2010.
(18%
acceptance rate)
Sirajum Munir, Shan Lin, Enamul Hoque, S. M. Shahriar Nirjon, John
A. Stankovic, and Kamin Whitehouse. Addressing Burstiness for Reliable
Communication and Latency Bound Generation in Wireless Sensor
Networks. The 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on
Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '10). Stockholm, Sweden,
April 12-16, 2010.
(18% acceptance rate)
Vijay Srinivasan, John Stankovic and Kamin Whitehouse. Using
Height Sensors for Biometric Identification in Multi-resident Homes. In
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing
(Pervasive). Helsinki, Finland, May 17-20, 2010.
(23% acceptance
rate)
Shan Lin, Gang Zhou, Kamin Whitehouse, Yafeng Wu, John A. Stankovic, and Tian
He. Towards Stable Network Performance in Wireless Sensor
Networks. In the 30th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS
2009). Washington, DC, 2009.
(21% acceptance rate)
Tamim Sookoor, Timothy Hnat, Pieter Hooimeijer, Westley Weimer, and
Kamin Whitehouse. Macrodebugging: Global Views of Distributed
Program Execution. The 7th ACM Conference on
Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009). Berkeley, CA,
Nov. 2009.
(17.6% acceptance rate)
Nithya Ramanathan, Tom Schoellhammer, Eddie Kohler, Kamin Whitehouse, Thomas
Harmon, and Deborah Estrin. Suelo: Human-assisted Sensing for
Exploratory Soil Monitoring Studies. The 7th ACM Conference on Embedded
Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009). Berkeley, CA,
Nov. 2009.
(17.6% acceptance rate)
Jiakang Lu, and Kamin Whitehouse. Flash Flooding: Exploiting the Capture Effect for Rapid Flooding in Wireless Sensor Networks. The 28th Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2009). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Apr. 2009.
(19.6% acceptance rate)
Timothy Hnat, Tamim Sookoor, Pieter Hooimeijer, Westley Weimer, and Kamin
Whitehouse "MacroLab:
A Vector-based Macroprogramming Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems". . The
6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2008). Raleigh,
NC, Nov. 2008.
(16% acceptance rate) (ppt)
Qing Cao, Tarek Abdelzaher, John Stankovic, Kamin Whitehouse, and Liqian Luo. Declarative Tracepoints: A Programmable and Application Independent Debugging System for Wireless Sensor Networks. The 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked
Sensor Systems (SenSys 2008). Raleigh, NC, Nov. 2008.
(16% acceptance rate)
Vijay Srinivasan, John A. Stankovic and Kamin Whitehouse. Protecting Your Daily In-home Activity Information from a Wireless Snooping Attack. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). Seoul, Korea, September 2008.
(19% acceptance rate)
Jingbin Zhang, Gang Zhou, Sang H. Son, John A. Stankovic and Kamin Whitehouse. Performance Analysis of Group Based Detection for Sparse Sensor Networks. The 28th International Conference on
Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). Beijing, China, June 2008.
(16% acceptance rate)
Jing Yang, M.L. Soffa, L. Selavo, and K. Whitehouse.
Clairvoyant: A
Comprehensive Source-Level Debugger for Wireless Sensor Networks.
The 5th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys). Sydney, Australia, November
2007.
(17% acceptance rate) (PPT)
Kamin Whitehouse, David Culler. "A Robustness Analysis of Multi-hop
Ranging-based Localization Approximations". The Fifth
International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN
'06). Nashville, TN, April 19-21, 2006.
(25% acceptance rate)
Kamin Whitehouse, Gilman Tolle, Jay Taneja, Cory Sharp, Sukun Kim, Jaein
Jeong, Jonathan Hui, Prabal Dutta, and David Culler. "Marionette:
Using RPC for Interactive Development and Debugging of Wireless Embedded Networks". The Fifth International Conference on Information
Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '06). Nashville, TN,
April 21, 2006.
(25% acceptance rate)
(ppt)
Prabal Dutta, Jonathan Hui, Jaein Jeong, Sukun Kim, Cory Sharp, Jay
Taneja, Gilman Tolle, Kamin Whitehouse, and David Culler. "Trio:
Enabling Sustainable and Scalable Outdoor Wireless Sensor Network
Deployments". The Fifth International Conference on Information
Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '06). Nashville, TN,
April 21, 2006.
(25% acceptance rate)
Kamin Whitehouse, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao."Semantic Streams: a Framework
for Composable Inference over Sensor Data". The Third European Workshop on Wireless
Sensor Networks (EWSN), Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Zurich, Switzerland. February 13-15, 2006.
(16% acceptance rate)
(ppt)
Kamin Whitehouse, Alec Woo, Fred Jiang, Joseph Polastre, David Culler. "Exploiting the Capture Effect for Collision Detection and Recovery." The Second IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS-II). Sydney, Australia. May 30-31, 2005. (ppt)
Kamin Whitehouse, Chris Karlof, Alec Woo, Fred Jiang, David Culler.
"The Effects of Ranging Noise on Multihop Localization: an Empirical
Study" The Fourth International Conference on Information
Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '05). Los Angeles, California. April 25-27, 2005.
(21% acceptance rate)
(ppt)
Kamin Whitehouse, Cory Sharp, Eric Brewer, David Culler.
"Hood: a Neighborhood Abstraction for Sensor Networks."
In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications,
and Services (MobiSys '04).
Boston, MA, June, 2004.
ACM Press.
(14% acceptance rate)
(ppt)
"TinyOS: An Operating System for Wireless Sensor Networks" , Philip Levis, Sam Madden, Joseph Polastre, Robert Szewczyk, Kamin Whitehouse, Alec Woo, David Gay, Jason Hill, Matt Welsh, Eric Brewer, and David Culler. Ambient Intelligence. W. Weber, J. Rabaey, and E. Aarts (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, 2004.
Kamin Whitehouse, David Culler.
"Calibration as Parameter Estimation in Sensor Networks."
In Proceedings of ACM International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA'02).
Atlanta, Georgia, September 28, 2002.
ACM Press.
(25% acceptance rate)
(ppt)
Multimedia
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Keep warm with a data furnace by misener |
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Watch this video to see a vision of what we call the "Marauder's Map": the system detects who is in each room and what electrical/water fixtures they are using -- without instrumenting the people or the fixtures. There is also a full (but less edited) video with a