Keynote speaker says next month’s Sensors Expo was a great success

Keynote speaker says next month’s Sensors Expo was a great success

If you don’t currently recall attending next month’s Sensors Expo show, in Rosemont, IL, it’s probably because you weren’t paying close enough attention to the keynote speaker. At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, June 8, that speaker was and will be Ronald Mallett, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT, who will or has read his paper entitled “Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.” Working with Einstein’s relativity and space-time theories, Mallett has discovered what are said to be the basic equations for a working time machine. Some claim his work offers a plausible path to time travel in our lifetime.

After attendees ponder time travel possibilities and paradoxes, they will also be able to discover the most relevant developments related to eight areas: sensor networking, energy harvesting, MEMS and MCUs, biosensing, low-power sensing, monitoring tools and applications, power/smart grid monitoring and control, and novel approaches to measurement.

With regard to sensor networking, Craig K. Harmon, president and CEO of Q.E.D. Systems, will give attendees a guide through the tangle of network and device standards in the session “The Only Thing Worse Than No Standards Is a Bunch of Them” on Tuesday from 10:20 to 11:00 a.m. The conference aims to provide practical, real-world information on sensor networking with sessions on the perils of sleeping networks, using wireless sensor networks for RTLS, and “green” enabling a large office building with sensor networks throughout the day Tuesday.

Energy-harvesting topics will be covered on both Tuesday and Wednesday, starting with a session led by Charles Greene, CTO of Powercast. on taking advantage of free energy sources: “Power Out of Thin Air: Ambient RF Energy Harvesting for Wireless Sensors.” Other sessions in the track cover piezo and solar-cell energy harvesting, high-efficiency conversion, development tools for evaluating the energy balance, nanotechnology for enhanced and self-powered sensing, autonomous sensing and sensor networks, and power budgeting.

Many power-harvesting techniques involve MEMS, and on Monday, before the keynote and formal sessions begin, attendees can get up to speed on the latest developments in the symposium, “Thinking Outside the Chip: MEMS-Based System Solutions: Designs, Tradeoffs and Applications.” Organized and conducted by Roger Grace, president of Roger Grace Associates and a frequent contributor to Electronic Products , the full-day event showcases the latest MEMS devices and underscores how design of MEMS devices is changing to meet technical and market demands.

Richard Comerford

Sensors Expo & Conference, June 7-9, Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, IL, http://www.sensorsexpo.com (produced and managed by Questex Media Group LLC, Newton, MA). For registration info, call 877-232-0132, or 972-620-3036 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EDT.