Escape from Alcatraz 2012

Posted on June 26, 2012 by admin

Long before I even started exercising, I caught, randomly, a Canadian TV special dedicated to the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon race.  It seemed insane — people swim over 2km from the Alcatraz Island to the San Fransisco shore, then bike on San Fransisco hills, and then also run 8 miles, also on these crazy hills! Insane! What kind of a crazy person would want to do this, I thought.

Fast forward 5 years, and — last week, I did it. Forced myself to jump off the San Fransisco Belle into the very cold water with the coast barely even visible, battled currents for far too long and then biked the hills and ran the beautiful but treacherous 8 miles on all sorts of terrain including the soft pacific sand.  Fantastic experience.

Finishing up the race with the biggest smile on my face:

Alcatraz_run_Gorlatova

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2011 IEEE Communications Society Award

Posted on December 25, 2011 by admin

MariaGorlatova_Globecom_awardI received the 2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications earlier this month at the 2011 IEEE GLOBECOM award ceremony in Houston, TX.  This award recognizes papers that open new lines of work, envision bold approaches to communication, formulate new problems to solve, and essentially enlarge the field of communications engineering.

More information about the paper and the awards, via Columbia University School of Engineering: EE/CS Paper Wins National Award for New Communication Topics.

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EnHANTs Project Demo Video

Posted on December 6, 2011 by admin

We have put together a video of the EnHANTs testbed demonstration, based on the demonstration we presented — and got the Best Student Demo Award for — at ACM SenSys 2011 back in November. The video is available here.

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Bright Future for Wearable Smart Devices?

Posted on September 5, 2011 by admin

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.

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Scientific Process

Posted on August 14, 2011 by admin

Scientific process as we imagine it to be and as it is.

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IoT infographic

Posted on August 5, 2011 by admin

Neat Internet of Things infographic.

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Fascinating Papers: “Is the PHY Layer Dead?”

Posted on June 25, 2011 by admin

For the last few months the IEEE Communications Society top-10 downloaded papers list has included a broad paper based on a conference panel discussion: “Is the PHY Layer Dead?” by Mischa Dohler et al. This paper makes for a fascinating read; many of the issues highlighted in it, such as lack of connections between industry and academia, apply as much to the whole communications networking field as to the PHY layer.

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NYC Triathlon: Unique New York Experience

Posted on August 1, 2010 by admin

A bucket-list item checked off: I finished the NYC Triathlon.

I’ve done several shorter triathlons, but this was my first Olympic-distance event: 1.5 km swim, followed by a 40km bike ride, followed by a 10km run. In the NYC Triathlon, the swim is in the Hudson river, the bike ride is on the West Side Highway, and the run is partially on the 72nd street and partially in Central Park.

The race is all about New York — but a New York that is different from its commonplace day-to-day version.

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Emerald Nuts Midnight Run: Chilly Fun

Posted on January 4, 2010 by admin

This year we’ve decided to do something different for the New Years: a Central Park Midnight 4-miler, which is more of a party than a run, but the running of a 4-mile distance on New Year’s, at midnight, is involved.

The event goes like this. First, there is a two-hour party in Central Park around the bandshell, then, before midnight, we count down the seconds while being lined up for the run, and at midnight the Park’s fireworks start, and the crowd gets moving, beginning a four-miler. Fun! Somewhat crazy chilly fun. CNN covers this run in their New Years’ broadcast; we saw it a couple of years ago and thought those runners were crazy. And there we were, running it ourselves this year.

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