Lewis Girod

I am currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory, on the WaveScope project.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in December 2005, advised by Deborah Estrin (.pdf). From Fall 2000 to December 2005, I worked in the CENS (Center for Embedded Networked Sensing) Systems Laboratory (formerly known as the Laboratory for Embedded Collaborative Systems [LECS]), at UCLA.

My broad research interests are in large-scale, self-configuring and semi-autonomous networked systems.  For several years my research focus has been the development of autonomous, ad-hoc spatial location systems and related algorithms within the context of sensor networks.  My experiences from developing these systems, especially my experiences implementing ad-hoc localization within the SHM project, led me to discover a number of underlying collaboration primitives that were themselves interesting system components.  My current focus is to explore and characterize these primitives, using localization as an example application to show their relevance.

My implementation efforts have culminated in the development of the Acoustic ENSBox platform and the EmStar software environment. Acoustic ENSBox is a self-calibrating, ad-hoc deployable system of wireless acoustic array processors. It is a platform designed to support distributed acoustic sensing applications, such as acoustic habitat monitoring and security systems. In recent tests in an outdoor, forested environment, a system of 10 Acoustic ENSBoxes in a 50 by 70 meter field estimated their 3D positions with an average position error of 20 cm, with no a priori information.

EmStar is a run-time environment for distributed embedded applications running on Linux-class hardware. We used EmStar to build, test, and deploy the software implementation of Acoustic ENSBox. To support our localization application, we added many reusable components to EmStar, including visualization tools, fault reporting and diagnostic tools, tools for managing many nodes at once, collaboration primitives for building distributed systems, and the localization system itself.

Publications

L. Girod, M. Lukac, V. Trifa, and D. Estrin. "The Design and Implementation of a Self-calibrating Acoustic Sensing Platform." in Proc. of SenSys 2006, to appear. .pdf

L. Girod, J. Elson, N. Ramanathan, T. Stathopoulos, M. Lukac, and D. Estrin. "EmStar: a Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Heterogeneous Sensor-Actuator Networks." In submission to ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. .ps

J. Feng, L. Girod and M. Potkonjak. "Consistency-Based On-line Localization in Sensor Networks." Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems: Second IEEE International Conference, DCOSS 2006, San Francisco, CA, USA, June 18-20, 2006. .pdf

M. Lukac, L. Girod, and D. Estrin, "Delay Tolerant Shell", In ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS 2006), 2006. .pdf

L. Girod, "A Self-Calibrating System of Distributed Acoustic Arrays", Ph.D. Thesis, UCLA, 2005. .pdf

T. Stathopoulos, L. Girod, J. Heidemann, and D. Estrin, “Mote Herding for Tiered Wireless Sensor Networks” in CENS Technical Report #58 , December 7 2005.  .pdf

L. Girod, M. Lukac, A. Parker, T. Stathopoulos, J. Tseng, H. Wang, D. Estrin, R. Guy, and E. Kohler, “A Reliable Multicast Mechanism for Sensor Network Applications”. Center for Embedded Networked Sensing Technical Report #48, April 25, 2005. .pdf

Hanbiao Wang, Lewis Girod, Nithya Ramanathan, Deborah Estrin and Kung Yao, "A Platform for Collaborate Acoustic Signal Processing" CENS Technical Report 00XX, November 28, 2004. pdf ps

J. Elson, L. Girod, and D. Estrin, "EmStar: Development with High System Visibility", IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, Dec 2004.

Nithya Ramanathan, Eddie Kohler, Lewis Girod, and Deborah Estrin. "Sympathy: A Debugging System for Sensor Networks." Workshop Record of the 1st IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS-I), Tampa, Florida, November 2004. .pdf

K. Sohrabi, W. Merrill, J. Elson, L. Girod, F. Newberg, and W. Kaiser, "Methods for Scalable Self-Assembly of Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks", in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Oct-Dec 2004, vol 3, no 4, pp 317-331.

W. Merrill, L. Girod, B. Schiffer, D. McIntire, G. Rava, K. Sohrabi, F. Newberg, J. Elson, and W. Kaiser, "Dynamic Networking and Smart Sensing Enable Next-Generation Landmines", in IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, Oct-Dec 2004, pp. 82-89. .pdf

L. Girod, T. Stathopoulos, N. Ramanathan, J. Elson, D. Estrin, E. Osterweil, and T. Schoellhammer "A System for Simulation, Emulation, and Deployment of Heterogeneous Sensor Networks", in Proc. of SenSys 2004. .pdf .ps Also published as CENS TR 37. .pdf

L. Girod, J. Elson, A. Cerpa, T. Stathopoulos, N. Ramanathan, D. Estrin, "EmStar: a Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks", in Proceedings of USENIX 04, also CENS Technical Report 34. .ps, .pdf

W. Merrill, L. Girod, B. Schiffer, D. McIntire, G. Rava, K. Sohrabi, F. Newberg, J. Elson, and W. Kaiser, "Defense Systems: Self Healing Land Mines", a chapter in the forthcoming book "Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems Perspective", Edited by Bulusu and Jha, Artech House Publishers.

A. Savvides, L. Girod, M. Srivastava, and D. Estrin, "Localization in Sensor Networks", a chapter in the book "Wireless Sensor Networks", Edited by Znati, Radhavendra and Sivalingam. .ps, .pdf

D. Estrin, W. Michener, G. Bonito, and Workshop Participants, "Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Needs for Distributed Sensor Networks: A Report From an NSF Workshop", Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA 2003. (Lead writer for chap. 4) html

J. Elson, S. Bien, N. Busek, V. Bychkovskiy, A. Cerpa, D. Ganesan, L. Girod, B. Greenstein, T. Schoellhammer, T. Stathopoulos, and D. Estrin, "EmStar: An Environment for Developing Wireless Embedded Systems Software" .pdf, CENS Technical Report 0009, March 24, 2003.

Hanbiao Wang, Deborah Estrin, Lewis Girod, "Preprocessing in a Tiered Sensor Network for Habitat Monitoring" .PDF in EURASIP JASP special issue of sensor networks, Vol. 2003, No. 4, pp. 392-401, March 15, 2003.

Hanbiao Wang, Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod, Deborah Estrin, and Kung Yao, "Target Classification and Localization in Habitat Monitoring" .ps, .pdf In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2003), Hong Kong, China. April 2003.

Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod and Deborah Estrin, "Fine-Grained Network Time Synchronization using Reference Broadcasts", .ps, .pdf In Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, MA. December 2002. UCLA Technical Report 020008.

W. Merrill, F. Newberg, L. Girod, K. Sohrabi, "Battlefield ad-hoc LANs: A Distributed Processing Perspective", GOMACTech 2004, Moneterey, CA, March 2004.

W. Merrill, L. Girod, J. Elson, K. Sohrabi, F. Newberg, W. Kaiser, "Autonomous Position Location in Distributed, Embedded, Wireless Systems", In Proceedings of the IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, CA, Sept. 2002. .pdf

K. Sohrabi, W. Merrill, J. Elson, L. Girod, F. Newberg, W. Kaiser, "Scalable Self-Assembly for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks", In Proceedings of the IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, CA, Sept. 2002. .pdf

W. Merrill, K. Sohrabi, L. Girod, J. Elson, F. Newberg, W. Kaiser, "Open Standard Development Platforms for Distributed Sensor Networks", Proceedings of the SPIE Aero Sense Conference, 2002. .pdf

Lewis Girod, Vladimir Bychkovskiy, Jeremy Elson, and Deborah Estrin, "Locating tiny sensors in time and space: A case study", .ps, .pdf In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD 2002), Freiburg, Germany. September 16-18 2002. Invited paper.

Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod, and Deborah Estrin, "Short Paper: A Wireless Time-Synchronized COTS Sensor Platform, Part I: System Architecture" .ps, .pdf In Proceedings of the IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, California. September 5-6 2002.

L. Girod, D. Estrin, "Robust Range Estimation Using Acoustic and Multimodal Sensing" (.ps) (.pdf) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2001) , Maui, Hawaii, October 2001.

D. Estrin, L. Girod, G. Pottie, M. Srivastava, "Instrumenting the World with Wireless Sensor Networks" (.ps) International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2001), Salt Lake City, Utah, May 2001.

A. Cerpa, J. Elson, D. Estrin, L. Girod, M. Hamilton and J. Zhao, "Habitat monitoring: Application driver for wireless communications technology" (.ps) 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Data Communications in Latin America and the Caribbean, Costa Rica, April 2001.

L. Girod, "Development and Characterization of an Acoustic Rangefinder" (.ps) Technical Report USC-CS-00-728, April 2000.

Talks

Patents (Resulting from work at Sensoria Corp.)

Class Presentations:

CV

Research and Teaching Statement

Contact Information

Past Projects


girod@lecs.cs.ucla.edu
Last updated 20 May 2006