Hi, I’m Josh Adkins. I am a fifth year PhD student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science working with Prabal Dutta and Lab11 at the University of California, Berkeley. I am an NSF GRFP Fellow.

My research focuses on creating, deploying, programming, and interacting with ubiquitous sensor systems. I’m currently most interested in two problems: 1) How can we enable the easy deployment and management of dense sensor networks, and 2) programming systems that will allow us to easily specify programs for an entire set of these sensors and actuators while still working within their energy, power, memory, and computational constraints.

I am most actively working on the design, construction, deployment, and management of power grid reliability sensors in Accra, Ghana as part of GridWatch and nLine. These sensors will help us to both independently evaluate the impact of grid improvements on reliability, and, in collaboration with a team of UC Berkeley economists, to quantify the socioeconomic impacts of (un)reliability. We currently have a deployment of nearly 700 sensors running in Accra. A paper about insights from the deployment was presented at COMPASS 2019.

I am also working on a resource manager for the servers, gateways, and resource constrained sensors that constitute the “edge”. By modifying the communications protocols and execution environments of a traditional resource manager to operate under the resource constraints of low-power sensors, we hope to enable multiple users to program sets of sensors through high-level, and potentially interactive programming environments. Check out the in-progress code base for this project.

In the past I have worked on:

- A new generation of indoor, harvesting sensor nodes that uses both primary and secondary cells to increase energy reliability, which Neal Jackson presented at IPSN 2019.

- The Signpost platform for city-scale sensing, a modular, energy-harvesting platform for lowering the bar to city-scale sensing presented at IPSN 2018.

- Monoxalyze, which works with a smartphone to provide a keychain-sized smoking cessation compliance mechanism and was presented at SenSys 2016.

Updates

January 2021: Utility-Independent Measurements of Electricity Reliability in Accra, Ghana accepted to IPSN ‘21

November 2020: A Gridwatch chapter will be included in Springer’s Introduction to Development Engineering.

October 2020: Work on Edge Resource Management won best poster at CONIX 2020 annual review

February 2020: Browsing the Web of Connectable Things accepted to EWSN ‘20

July 2019: Unlicensed LPWANs Are Not Yet the Path to Ubiquitous Connectivity accepted to MobiCom ‘19

May 2019: Insights from Measuring Grid Reliability in Accra, Ghana accepted to COMPASS ‘19

March 2019: Won departmental outstanding GSI award for work on EECS 149/249 in Fall 2018

February 2019: Completed deployment of over 200 additional PowerWatch sensors in Accra

January 2019: Capacity over Capacitance for Reliable Energy Harvesting Sensors accepted to IPSN ‘19

December 2018: Freeloader’s Guide Through the Google Galaxy accepted to HotMobile ‘19

September 2018: Started teaching and redesigning labs for EECS 149/249 - Intro to Embedded Systems