This week’s Economist has a piece on Marc Andreessen, a founder of Mosaic and Netscape turned venture capitalist. One of the things he apparently believes is that there soon be drastic changes in realm of personal technology and “body area networks” with wearable smart devices.
[Full article (but this is just an offhand remark in it) is available here ]
For a sensor networking person, it is truly exciting to see a prominent VC share this vision of the future. Furthermore, it is also very encouraging to see how successful Nike+ has been with their model of combining personal wearable sensors and social networking. Energy — battery size and lifetime — are still limiting factors for wearable devices, making energy harvesting projects evermore exciting and timely.
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
