IPSN '03: Speakers' Biographies

Prof. Kris Pister (Dust Inc. and University of California, Berkeley)
"Smart Dust"

Kristofer S.J. Pister received his B.A. in Applied Physics from UCSD in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1989 and 1992. From 1992 to 97 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. In 1996 he joined the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. His research interests include MEMS, robotics, micro optics, sensor networks, and CAD for MEMS. Dr. Pister is currently on leave from the University to serve as the CEO of Dust, Inc., a Berkeley startup working to commercialize the Smart Dust project.

Dr. Joel Birnbaum, Hewlett-Packard
Talk title TBD

Joel S. Birnbaum is senior technical advisor of HP. In this position, he reports directly to Carly Fiorina, HP chairman, president and CEO. His role is to continue to help the company shape its technology strategy and to communicate this strategy to the marketplace. Prior to that, Birnbaum served as the company's chief scientist, senior vice president for R&D, and director of HP Laboratories. He was responsible for the coordination of worldwide activities in R&D and served as the company's chief technical officer. Dr. Birnbaum holds a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University, and master's and doctoral degrees in nuclear physics from Yale University. He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM, a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. Birnbaum's board memberships include the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Technion University of Israel, Multimedia Medical Systems, the Euphrat Museum of Art and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He also serves on advisory councils at CMU, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley.

Prof. P.R. Kumar (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
"The Convergence of Sensing, Actuation, Wireless Networking and
Computation"

P. R. Kumar is Franklin Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his B. Tech. degree from IIT Madras, and D.Sc. degree from Washington University, St. Louis. He was the recipient of Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council. He has presented plenary lectures at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, SIAM Conference on Optimization, SIAM Annual Meeting, and German Open Conference on Probability and Statistics. His current research interests are in wireless networks, the convergence of control with communication and computing, wafer fabrication plants, manufacturing systems, machine learning, and financial economics. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

Prof. David Cheriton (Stanford University)
"The State of Distributed Systems"

David Cheriton is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research includes the areas of high-performance scalable distributed systems, Internet architecture and hardware-software interaction, particularly at the network and operating system level. Prof. Cheriton received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 1978 and has been at Stanford for the past 19 years. He is technical advisor with Cisco Systems and Google.com.