Nov 8, 2007: Research initiatives at the Motorola Application Research Center
Filed in: Colloquium
Shivajit Mohapatra, Bogdan Carbunar and Yang Yu:
Motorola Labs
Dr. Bogdan Carbunar
In this talk we present a novel conditional e-cash protocol allowing future anonymous cashing of bank-issued e-money only upon the satisfaction of an agreed-upon public condition. Using this method, payers are able to remunerate payees for services that depend on future, yet to be determined outcomes of events. Once a payment is complete, any double-spending attempt by the payer will reveal its identity; no double-spending by the payee is possible. Payers can not be linked to payees or to ongoing or past transactions. The flow of cash within the system is thus both correct and anonymous. We discuss several applications of conditional e-cash including online trading of financial securities, prediction markets, and betting systems.
Dr. Bogdan Carbunar is a senior staff researcher at Motorola Labs, where he is developing novel applications for mobile wireless devices. His interests include applied cryptography, with applications in electronic payments and secure and private remote data processing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2005.
Melete: Support Concurrent Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks
Dr. Yang Yu
It is vital to support concurrent applications sharing a wireless sensor network in order to reduce the deployment and administrative costs, thus increasing the usability and efficiency of the network. I will present Melete, a system that supports concurrent applications with efficiency, reliability, flexibility, programmability, and scalability. Our work is based on the Mate virtual machine with significant modifications and enhancements. Melete enables reliable storage and execution of concurrent applications on a single sensor node. Dynamic grouping is used for flexible, on-the-fly deployment of applications based on contemporary status of the sensor nodes. The grouping procedure itself is programmed with the TinyScript language. A group-differentiated code dissemination mechanism is also developed for reliable and efficient code distribution among sensor nodes. Both analytical and simulation results are presented to study the impact of several key parameters and optimization techniques on the code dissemination mechanism. Simulation results indicate satisfactory scalability of our techniques to both application code size and node density. The usefulness and effectiveness of Melete is also validated by empirical study.
Dr. Yang Yu is currently a Senior Staff Research Engineer at the Pervasive Platforms and Architectures Lab, Application Research Center, Motorola Labs. Yang received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 1996 and 1999 respectively, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2005. His research interest includes system modeling, algorithm design, and performance analysis for energy efficient mobile computing and wireless sensor networks. Yang has co-authored over 20 technical papers and a book on cross- layer optimization for sensor networks. Yang is serving as program co- chair for the International Workshop on Mobile Device and Urban Sensing (MODUS), 2008.
Dr. Bogdan Carbunar
Abstract
In this talk we present a novel conditional e-cash protocol allowing future anonymous cashing of bank-issued e-money only upon the satisfaction of an agreed-upon public condition. Using this method, payers are able to remunerate payees for services that depend on future, yet to be determined outcomes of events. Once a payment is complete, any double-spending attempt by the payer will reveal its identity; no double-spending by the payee is possible. Payers can not be linked to payees or to ongoing or past transactions. The flow of cash within the system is thus both correct and anonymous. We discuss several applications of conditional e-cash including online trading of financial securities, prediction markets, and betting systems.
Bio
Dr. Bogdan Carbunar is a senior staff researcher at Motorola Labs, where he is developing novel applications for mobile wireless devices. His interests include applied cryptography, with applications in electronic payments and secure and private remote data processing. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2005.
Melete: Support Concurrent Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks
Dr. Yang Yu
Abstract
It is vital to support concurrent applications sharing a wireless sensor network in order to reduce the deployment and administrative costs, thus increasing the usability and efficiency of the network. I will present Melete, a system that supports concurrent applications with efficiency, reliability, flexibility, programmability, and scalability. Our work is based on the Mate virtual machine with significant modifications and enhancements. Melete enables reliable storage and execution of concurrent applications on a single sensor node. Dynamic grouping is used for flexible, on-the-fly deployment of applications based on contemporary status of the sensor nodes. The grouping procedure itself is programmed with the TinyScript language. A group-differentiated code dissemination mechanism is also developed for reliable and efficient code distribution among sensor nodes. Both analytical and simulation results are presented to study the impact of several key parameters and optimization techniques on the code dissemination mechanism. Simulation results indicate satisfactory scalability of our techniques to both application code size and node density. The usefulness and effectiveness of Melete is also validated by empirical study.
Bio
Dr. Yang Yu is currently a Senior Staff Research Engineer at the Pervasive Platforms and Architectures Lab, Application Research Center, Motorola Labs. Yang received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 1996 and 1999 respectively, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2005. His research interest includes system modeling, algorithm design, and performance analysis for energy efficient mobile computing and wireless sensor networks. Yang has co-authored over 20 technical papers and a book on cross- layer optimization for sensor networks. Yang is serving as program co- chair for the International Workshop on Mobile Device and Urban Sensing (MODUS), 2008.