Who We Are: Deborah Estrin

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Estrin received her Ph.D. (1985) in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her B.S. (1980) from U.C. Berkeley. Before joining UCLA she was a member of the University of Southern California, Computer Science Department.

In 1987, Professor Estrin received the National Science Foundation, Presidential Young Investigator Award for her research in network interconnection and security. During the subsequent 10 years much of her research focused on the design of network and routing protocols for very large, global, networks, such as: scalable multicast routing and transport protocols, self-configuring protocol mechanisms for scalability and robustness, and tools and methods for designing and studying large scale networks. Since the late 90′s Professor Estrin has been collaborating with colleagues and students to develop protocols and systems architectures needed to realize rapidly-deployable and robustly-operating networks of physically-embedded devices. She is particularly interested in the application of spatially and temporally dense embedded sensors to environmental monitoring. Most recently this work includes participatory-sensing systems, based on automated, programmable, and adaptive collection of environmental, physiological, and social parameters at the personal and community level. These systems will leverage the installed base of image and acoustic sensors that we all carry around in our pockets or on our belts.cell phones.

Estrin has been a co-PI on many NSF and DARPA funded projects. She chaired a 1997-98 ISAT study on sensor networks and the 2001 NRC study on Networked Embedded Computing which produced the report Embedded Everywhere. She chaired the Sensors and Sensor Networks subcommittee of the NEON Network Design Committee (http://neoninc.org). Estrin also served on the Advisory Committees for the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Environmental Research and Education(ERE) Directorates, and is currently a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of The National Academies.

Professor Estrin is a fellow of the ACM, AAAS and the IEEE. She has served on numerous panels for the NSF, National Academy of Sciences/NRC, and DARPA. She has also served as an editor for the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networks, and as a program committee member for many networking related conferences, including Sigcomm and Infocom. She was Steering Group Chair and General Co-Chair for the first ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Sensys 2003, and served as one of the first Associate Editors for the new ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.

Professor Estrin was selected as the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer in 2006. The Athena Lectures celebrate women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to Computer Science.