Graduated: UC Berkeley PhD, May 2003. I have now moved on to found JLH Labs. JLH Labs is both developing application specific solutions using wireless sensor network technology and offering consulting services to the industry. I also continue to maintain close ties with the TinyOS research ongoing across the country.

After spending 8 years at UC Berkeley – Bachelors, Masters, PHD – I have finally departed. Special thanks to David Culler – my adviser – and Kris Pister for their guidance and direction. An electronic copy of my dissertation can be found here.

My research and thesis was on wireless sensor networks, and emerging new field of computer science. Starting from Kris Pister’s vision of Smart Dust a group of students and I developed the TinyOS operating system. Now in use at over 30 Universities and 300+ industrial locations, TinyOS has become the premier operating system for sensor network research. (www.tinyos.net)

In addition to developing the software foundation for Berkeley’s sensor network research I also developed several generations of the “mote” hardware platform. Motes combine processing, sensing and wireless networking into a single tiny package. I have designed nodes including the Dot node, Rene, Mica and Spec.

The Mica mote, combined with TinyOS, became the foundation of the NEST research project. Started in 2001, DARPA funded a group of top research universities to explore the software and networking of wireless sensor networks. The Mica mote was delivered to these universities as their primary research platform. Thousands of applications and hundreds of demonstrations have been preformed using this platform.

The most advanced node I developed was the millimeter size Spec node. Spec measured just 2.5 mm on each side. It was a full-custom CMOS chip containing processor, memory and RF communications. It was fabricated by National Semiconductor in Fall of 2002 using their .35 micron process. Spec is pictured below. More information can be found here.

Picture of the Spec die.

In addition to my work as a graduate student, I also spent the last few years helping to start the Berkeley Intel Research Lab, working for the Robert Bosch Corporation, and helping to start Dust Inc.

Sept 2003, I was awarded MIT Technology Review’s Top 100 young innovator award, and in 2001 I was awarded the C.V. Ramamoorthy distinguished research award from UC Berkeley.

Here is the picture of the TinyOS motes I designed being dropped at Twenty nine-palms air-to-ground combat center.

Here is a link to a power point file that contains an overview of some of the things I did while at Berkeley.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jhill/Work_At_Berkeley.ppt

jhill@cs.berkeley.edu