William Randolph 'Randy' Sweeney (born January 7, 1956) is an American research scientist and director for R&D at Altria/Philip Morris USA. [1] [2] After retirement in 2010, Sweeney then founded a consultant group working in the "internet of things", later becoming Chief Engineer for Critical Power Systems Inc, and more recently a technology startup entrepreneur.
Sweeney was born in Richmond, Virginia and educated at the Virginia Tech. He graduated with a BS in electrical engineering in 1978.
Sweeney joined Philip Morris in 1978 directly after graduating, he began work in advanced digital process control, became a leader in human-machine interface, distributed network-centric control systems, artificial intelligence, machine vision systems and later was the principal technical lead in Digital Marketing Technology and the Identification Technologies R&D effort at Philip Morris USA. He has obtained over 60 patents in his field while working at Philip Morris. [3]
He was also a member of the R&D staffs of Kraft Foods and the Miller Brewing Company, working in advanced digital marketing and technology enhanced product development.
Sweeney was one of the founders of the Wonderware International Users Group and served as its first president. He also served as an organizing chairman of the 1999 Usenix Embedded Systems Conference. Sweeney was also a founding board member of MIT's "AutoID Center," which centered on RFID technology and created the Electronic Product Code (EPC). [4]
Following retirement in 2010, he served as a consultant to several companies in the areas of embedded "internet of things" technology and digital precision agriculture for Syngenta in Basel, Switzerland.
He became Chief Engineer of Critical Power Systems Inc. in 2014, supervising development of smart power systems for military and civilian use. In 2015, Sweeney was a founder and equity partner of GenUPS International, a smart power systems startup, where he also served as Director of Product Development.
Sweeney is a former adjunct professor of digital technology at Virginia Commonwealth University, [5] and has previously been a speaker at the IEEE Richmond Section. [6] In addition, Sweeney has spoken at workshops across the nation, including the RFID workshop at the University of Washington. [7]
Sweeney is retired once more and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. An RFID system consists of a tiny radio transponder called a tag, a radio receiver, and a transmitter. When triggered by an electromagnetic interrogation pulse from a nearby RFID reader device, the tag transmits digital data, usually an identifying inventory number, back to the reader. This number can be used to track inventory goods.
Smartdust is a system of many tiny microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) such as sensors, robots, or other devices, that can detect, for example, light, temperature, vibration, magnetism, or chemicals. They are usually operated on a computer network wirelessly and are distributed over some area to perform tasks, usually sensing through radio-frequency identification. Without an antenna of much greater size the range of tiny smart dust communication devices is measured in a few millimeters and they may be vulnerable to electromagnetic disablement and destruction by microwave exposure.
MIFARE is a series of integrated circuit (IC) chips used in contactless smart cards and proximity cards.
Ambient intelligence (AmI) is a term used in computing to refer to electronic environments that are sensitive to the presence of people. The term is generally applied to consumer electronics, telecommunications, and computing.
A home network or home area network (HAN) is a type of computer network that facilitates communication among devices within the close vicinity of a home. Devices capable of participating in this network, for example, smart devices such as network printers and handheld mobile computers, often gain enhanced emergent capabilities through their ability to interact. These additional capabilities can be used to increase the quality of life inside the home in a variety of ways, such as automation of repetitive tasks, increased personal productivity, enhanced home security, and easier access to entertainment.
A smart transducer is an analog or digital transducer, actuator, or sensor combined with a processing unit and a communication interface.
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Daintree Networks, Inc. was a building automation company that provided wireless control systems for commercial and industrial buildings. Founded in 2003, Daintree was headquartered in Los Altos, California, with an R&D lab in Melbourne, Australia.
Robert S. H. Istepanian is a visiting professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College, London. Istepanian is widely recognized as the first scientist to coin the phrase m-Health. In 2012, Istepanian coined the new term 4G Health which is defined as "The evolution of m-health towards targeted personalized medical systems with adaptable functionalities and compatibility with the future 4G networks."
A smart object is an object that enhances the interaction with not only people but also with other smart objects. Also known as smart connected products or smart connected things (SCoT), they are products, assets and other things embedded with processors, sensors, software and connectivity that allow data to be exchanged between the product and its environment, manufacturer, operator/user, and other products and systems. Connectivity also enables some capabilities of the product to exist outside the physical device, in what is known as the product cloud. The data collected from these products can be then analyzed to inform decision-making, enable operational efficiencies and continuously improve the performance of the product.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are integrations of computation with physical processes. In cyber-physical systems, physical and software components are deeply intertwined, able to operate on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibit multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interact with each other in ways that change with context. CPS involves transdisciplinary approaches, merging theory of cybernetics, mechatronics, design and process science. The process control is often referred to as embedded systems. In embedded systems, the emphasis tends to be more on the computational elements, and less on an intense link between the computational and physical elements. CPS is also similar to the Internet of Things (IoT), sharing the same basic architecture; nevertheless, CPS presents a higher combination and coordination between physical and computational elements.
IEEE 1451 is a set of smart transducer interface standards developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Instrumentation and Measurement Society's Sensor Technology Technical Committee describing a set of open, common, network-independent communication interfaces for connecting transducers to microprocessors, instrumentation systems, and control/field networks. One of the key elements of these standards is the definition of Transducer electronic data sheets (TEDS) for each transducer. The TEDS is a memory device attached to the transducer, which stores transducer identification, calibration, correction data, and manufacturer-related information. The goal of the IEEE 1451 family of standards is to allow the access of transducer data through a common set of interfaces whether the transducers are connected to systems or networks via a wired or wireless means.
Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC) is a software research centre in Pune, India, established by Tata Group's TCS in 1981. TRDDC undertakes research in Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Process Engineering and Systems Research.
CISC Semiconductor GmbH defines itself as “a design and consulting service company for industries developing embedded microelectronic systems with extremely short Time-To-Market cycles.” The company started in 1999, working in the semiconductor industry, but soon expanded its field towards the automotive branch and further extended business towards the radio frequency technology (RFID) sector in 2003. Since then, CISC gained significant experience and expertise in RFID, developing an own business segment and highly sensitive measurement equipment to test and verify RFID systems for different industries. Representatives of CISC Semiconductor are actively working on and contributing to worldwide standardization of future technologies like RFID, in different standardization organizations. This effort brings CISC into the position of being a leader in research and development, and thus being able to be “one step ahead of innovation”. As of 2011 CISC Semiconductor was in a globally leading standardization position for RFID testing by providing the convener of ISO/IEC JTC1 WG4/SG6 on “RFID performance and conformance test methods“, as well as GS1 EPCglobal co-chairs for performance and conformance tests.
Rajit Gadh is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the founding director of the UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center (SMERC), the UCLA Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC), and the Connected and Autonomous Electric Vehicles Consortium (CAEV).
A digital object memory (DOMe) is a digital storage space intended to keep permanently all related information about a concrete physical object instance that is collected during the lifespan of this object and thus forms a basic building block for the Internet of Things (IoT) by connecting digital information with physical objects.
Saraju Mohanty is an Indian-American professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the director of the Smart Electronic Systems Laboratory, at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Mohanty received a Glorious India Award – Rich and Famous NRIs of America in 2017 for his contributions to the discipline. Mohanty is a researcher in the areas of "smart electronics for smart cities/villages", "smart healthcare", "application-Specific things for efficient edge computing", and "methodologies for digital and mixed-signal hardware". He has made significant research contributions to security by design (SbD) for electronic systems, hardware-assisted security (HAS) and protection, high-level synthesis of digital signal processing (DSP) hardware, and mixed-signal integrated circuit computer-aided design and electronic design automation. Mohanty has been the editor-in-chief (EiC) of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine during 2016-2021. He has held the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Very Large Scale Integration during 2014-2018. He holds 4 US patents in the areas of his research, and has published 500 research articles and 5 books. He is ranked among top 2% faculty around the world in Computer Science and Engineering discipline as per the standardized citation metric adopted by the Public Library of Science Biology journal.
Dominique "Dom" Guinard is the CTO of EVRYTHNG. He is a technologist, entrepreneur and developer with a career dedicated to building the Internet of Things both in the cloud and on embedded Things. He is particularly known for his early contributions to the Web of Things along with other researchers such as Vlad Trifa, Erik Wilde and Friedemann Mattern. Guinard is a published researcher, a book author and a recognized expert in Internet of Things technologies
Lina J. Karam is a Lebanese-American electrical and computer engineer and inventor. She is an IEEE Fellow. Her areas of work span digital signal processing, image/video processing, compression/coding and transmission, computer vision, machine learning/deep learning, perceptual-based visual processing, and automated mobility. She served as an expert delegate of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 Committee and participated in JPEG/MPEG standardization activities. She served as expert consultant in matters related to Intellectual Property (IP)/Patent Litigation, Image/Video Compression and Streaming, Image/Video Processing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Autonomous Driving.
Edwin Liu is the current president of Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). He was previously the senior vice president of Smart Grid & Grid Management at Nexant, Inc. He also held various technical and management positions at Quanta Technology, Bechtel, PG&E, Siemens, and Control Data Corporation (CDC). Edwin Liu is an IEEE Fellow and once served as chairman of its Computer and Analytical Methods Subcommittee.