Kamin Whitehouse
Commonwealth Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Virginia
501 Rice Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904
Phone: (434) 982-2211
Commonwealth Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Virginia
501 Rice Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904
Phone: (434) 982-2211
My current research is focused on "intelligent buildings", an interdisciplinary research area that sits at the boundary between Computer Science and Building Science. Some of my projects in this area focus on computer system performance (e.g. system reliability) while others focus on building performance (e.g. energy conservation). Details of many projects and papers are described below, or can be found in my CV.
I have been in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia since 2006. I earned my BA and BS from Rutgers University and my MS and PhD from UC Berkeley.
| Awarded the Commonwealth endowed chair. August, 2013 |
| The NSF funded our work on The BetaHome Network: A Multi-Home Testbed for Smart Building Technology. August, 2013. |
| Our Smart Water Heater was selected for the DOE's Max Tech and Beyond design competition for ultra-low-energy-use appliances and equipment. July, 2013. |
| Our FixtureFinder paper received the IP Track's Best Paper Runner Up award at IPSN'13, April, 2013 |
| Jing Yang defended his Ph.D. and is headed to Citadel, June, 2012 |
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| Tamim Sookoor defended his Ph.D. and is headed to the US Army Research Lab, May, 2012 |
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| 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, Nov, 2011 |
| Ginger Smith received honorable mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Nov, 2011 |
| Turn On the Server. It's Cold Inside. Nov 26, 2011 |
| Trane is funding our research on occupancy sensing in commercial buildings. Nov, 2011 |
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| Jiakang Lu defended his Ph.D. and is went to Nest Labs. 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 |
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
| 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 |
 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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