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

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 power and memory constraints.

Two of my active research projects that fit within this problem space are the Signpost platform for city-scale sensing, and a new generation of indoor sensor nodes. Signpost is a modular, energy-harvesting platform that attempts to lower the bar to city-scale sensing by removing the need for wired power and networking. The paper will be presented at IPSN 2018, and we are currently deploying the system on UC Berkeley’s campus! The new indoor sensor nodes are also energy harvesting, include a primary cell battery to increase reliability, and are being designed with the newest technology to achieve longer lifetimes. They will include services such as localization and self energy monitoring that will make them easier to densely deploy and program.

In the past I have worked on Monoxalyze, which works with a smartphone to provide a keychain-sized smoking cessation compliance mechanism; a paper on the topic appeared at ACM SenSys 2016. I have also worked on lowering the bar to casually interacting devices by collaborating on Summon, a web browser for physical devices, designed a a miniature, solar powered Bluetooth beacon called Cinamin, and proposed Ving, an idea to discover and communicate with devices sitting on the same surface using the vibratory motors commonly found in mobile phones.