Assistant Professor Murat Demirbas

Office: 244 Bell Hall, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA
Email: "my last name"@buffalo.edu

I am an assistant professor at the Computer Science and Engineering department of SUNY Buffalo. I lead the UBiComp Lab (University at Buffalo Ubiquitous Computing lab). I received an NSF CAREER award in 2008.

[ CV ] , [ Research Statement ]

My research interests are mainly in the areas of wireless sensor networks and distributed algorithms. More specifically, I focus on developing robust & resilient distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) services and applications. My work spans several layers of the WSN stack:

• MAC layers for robust single-hop broadcast communication
• Geometric infrastructures for local & resilient WSN services
• Programming abstractions for WSN control & collaboration applications
• Mobility induced resilience
• Real-world deployments of robust WSN
• Theory of resilient and self-healing computing

Recently, I also started working on pocket switched networks and smartphone applications for citywide sensing and collaboration.

Funded projects

My project titled "An In-network Collaboration and Coordination Framework for Wireless Sensor Actor Networks" has been funded by an NSF CAREER award (2008-2013).

While there have been many efficient point solutions to the in-network processing problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there has been little effort to address the underlying root research problem of devising an in-network collaboration and coordination framework that can achieve standardization and integration of in-network processing protocols. The objective of this project is to design and implement such a framework.

This framework introduces a decentralized transactional model that enables a node to update the state of its singlehop neighborhood consistently and atomically. One of the key insights in this framework is to observe that singlehop wireless broadcast has many useful features for facilitating collaboration and coordination. By exploiting the atomicity and broadcast properties of singlehop wireless communication, the framework provides a simple/clean abstraction and yet manages to retain the efficiency of execution. Moreover, this project also investigates the practical uses of receiver-side collision detection in singlehop collaborative feedback collection in WSNs.

By addressing the communication and concurrent execution challenges under the hood of its simple abstractions, the framework will provide a platform for developing and deploying distributed control applications as well as WSN in-network processing protocols. As such, this framework will be useful for multi-robot cooperative control applications and WSN-robotics integration for distributed sensing. More specifically, the framework will be demonstrated by developing a distributed multiple-pursuer/multiple-evader tracking application in WSNs.




My project titled "Efficient and resilient querying and tracking services for wireless sensor networks" is funded by ONR (2009-2012) for 510K.

A significant application of wireless sensor networks is in the area of intrusion detection and the related problem of querying and tracking of the location of the targets. Two major challenges facing querying and tracking services in wireless sensor networks are the scalability and reliability problems.

To address these challenges, our project focuses on developing local and resilient services for querying and tracking under several WSN environments, namely, static, passively mobile, and actively mobile WSNs.

My project titled "Tool-Support for Producing High-Assurance and Reliable Software for Wireless Sensor Actor Networks" is funded by NSF CSR (2009-2012).

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been mainly used for data collection purposes, and have not been employed in the context of any consistency- or safety-critical applications. As such software development for WSNs has been done mostly on a best-effort basis. However, as WSNs get more integrated with actuation capabilities, the resulting wireless sensor actor networks (WSANs) require more assurance and survivability guarantees. The goal of this project is to design and implement the tool-support necessary for achieving assurance and reliability of WSANs software.

The project will produce a transformation tool that allows programs for WSANs to be written in high-level models traditionally used to describe abstract distributed programs and automatically transforms these abstract programs, while preserving their correctness and reliability properties, into programs deployed in WSANs. The project will also develop a synthesis tool that manipulates the given abstract distributed programs for the automated addition of desired level of fault-tolerance. Finally, the project will design a framework that guards against the corruption of the auxiliary state introduced at the concrete system to ensure that the deployed program is verifiably reliable.