Abstract: For decades, smart devices (i.e. wireless sensing and computing systems) have relied primarily on battery power. Yet, batteries are bulky, expensive, high-maintenance, and not sustainable for the next trillion devices. Instead of relying on energy stored in a battery, the past decade has seen new approaches enabling battery-free, energy harvesting smart devices, deployed for passive, invisible, and long-term sensing tasks. These devices compute intermittently; losing power, harvesting energy, restoring computational state, and finally continuing execution from the last checkpoint. This new paradigm has required a rethinking of materials, hardware and software design, tool creation, and evaluation techniques.

In this talk, I will discuss the broad implications of what a battery-free, trillion device IoT means, outline previous work on the topic that focused on invisible devices, and then discuss the next decade of research in intermittent computing and the battery-free IoT; devices that are user facing and interactive, devices that novices can easily program, and devices that can perform useful inference. I will present late breaking work on soil powered sensors and smart face masks, highlight a new system allowing novices to program intermittently powered devices with Python, and discuss the conception and development of the worlds first battery-free Nintendo Game Boy. 

Bio: Josiah Hester is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Preventive Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Clemson University.