Distributed Systems I've worked in networking and distributed systems on and off for the past ten years. These days I'm mainly interested in distributed control systems. To get a sense of what I'm working on, you could take a look at two papers that are particularly guiding my work: one by Rotkowitz, Cogill, and Lall on convexity of distributed controllers, and one by Langbort, Chandra, and D'Andrea on controller design.

Sensor Networks Prior to that, my work focused on hardware and communications infrastructure for low-cost networks of embedded systems. The above picture shows a few such embedded controllers, called "Filaments", that I designed while an undergrad in the MIT Media Lab. We first deployed them in an installation at MoMA in New York, where a complex array of sensors was embedded in a large table and tracked the positions of objects and people's hands, creating an intuitive user interface.

Building Control We later used modified Filament technology to create a prototype building control network, with low-bandwidth networking all the way down to the level of the switches and light bubls. We demoed this technology at the Media House expo in Barcelona in the fall of 2001, show at right. Since then, the Filament project has evolved into the Internet-0 project, a joint effort with Sun Microsystems.

Distributed Audio In 2001 I also became interested in distributed audio, and developed the minniature Linux- and ethernet-based audio hardare shown at left. Sadly I got caught up in interactive robotics and my Masters thesis around the same time, and so I never had a chance to do much with that system, but the platform was pretty cool!