Assistant Professor Philip Levis

Office: 358 Gates Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-9030
Office hours: By appointment
Phone: +1 650 725 9046
email: pal at cs stanford edu, but I receive more email than I can handle. Please don't be offended if I don't reply.

Biography

 I'm an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments of Stanford University. When laws of scale and Moore's Law mean that we can have computers embedded everywhere and in everything, it's unlikely that they will use the operating systems, networking, or programming languages of today. I'm interested in researching what these low-power wireless networks comprised of large numbers of tiny embedded nodes will use. I'm also interested in the design of large-scale networked systems for virtual worlds, in part due to their ability to bridge physical and virtual environments. I head the Stanford Information Networking Group (SING). In 2008, I received the honor of being a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow as well as an NSF CAREER award.

Current Courses

 CS144: Introduction to Computer Networking, Spring 2008 (co-taught with David Mazières), Fall 2008
CS340V: Networked Systems for Virtual Worlds, Fall 2008

Other Courses

CS67N: The Computer of History, the Computer of Fiction, Winter 2006
CS240E: Low-Power Sensing Systems, Winter 2007
CS244E: Low-Power Wireless Networking, Spring 2007
CS344E: Sensor Network Systems, Spring 2006, Spring 2008 (used to be CS344A)
EE108A, Fall 2006 (co-taught with Bill Dally), Winter 2008

TinyOS Programming Manual

I've recently written a short book on programming TinyOS. Unlike the tutorials, which are a brief introduction to get you started, or TEPs, which describe parts of TinyOS 2.0, Programming TinyOS digs into nesC and how you can use it to build TinyOS applications. Except for a few fictional components in the beginning, almost every concept has a TinyOS 2.0 implementation as an example. A second version of the text, co-written with David Gay, will soon be available for purchase in April of 2009. We tried to keep the cost down by making it softcover and having very tiny royalties. Unfortunately, though, TinyOS programming is not a blockbuster topic, so the book is a bit pricier than I'd like. Oh well.

Selected Publications (full list)

You can generally find more up-to-date and detailed information on the SING website.

  • Yang Chen, Omprakash Gnawali, Maria Kazandjieva, Philip Levis, and John Regehr.
    "Surviving Sensor Network Software Faults." In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), 2009.
    [In preparation.]
  • Rodrigo Fonseca, Prabal Dutta, Philip Levis, and Ion Stoica.
    "Quanto: Tracking Energy in Networked Embedded Systems." In Proceedings of the Eighth USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2008.
    [PDF (400K)]
  • Kannan Srinivasan, Maria Kazandijeva, Saatvik Agarwal, and Philip Levis.
    "The β-factor: Measuring Wireless Link Burstiness." In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2008.
    [PDF (4MB)]
  • Philip Levis, Eric Brewer, David Culler, David Gay, Samuel Madden, Neil Patel, Joe Polastre, Scott Shenker, Robert Szewczyk, and Alec Woo.
    "The Emergence of a Networking Primitive in Wireless Sensor Networks." In Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 7, July 2008.
    [PDF (4MB)]
  • Megan Wachs, Jung Il Choi, Jung Woo Lee, Kannan Srinivasan, Zhe Chen, Mayank Jain and Philip Levis
    "Visibility: A New Metric for Protocol Design." In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2007.
    [PDF (580K)]
  • Kevin Klues, Vlado Handziski, Chenyang Lu, Adam Wolisz, David Culler, David Gay, and Philip Levis
    "Integrating Concurrency Control and Energy Management in Device Drivers." In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), 2007.
    [PDF (718K)]
  • Philip Levis, Neil Patel, David Culler, and Scott Shenker
    "Trickle: A Self-Regulating Algorithm for Code Propagation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks." In Proceedings of the First USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2004). Received best paper award.
    [HTML][PDF (3.0M)]

Some Talks
  • "Towards a Wireless Lexicon."
    Bertinoro Wireless Workshop, Aug. 20, 2007.
    [PDF (2.2M)]
  • "Low-Power Sensor Networks: A Case Study in Seeking Distributed Dependability."
    Keynote at NSF HCCS-CPS Workshop, Nov. 30, 2006.
    [PDF (1.5M)]
  • "IP and Low-Power Wireless: Madness, the Future, or Both?"
    HotNets V, Nov. 29, 2006.
    [PDF (3.8M)]
  • "TinyOS: An Open Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks. Part II: Network Architecture."
    Invited Tutorial, IEEE MDM, May 11, 2006.
    [PDF (13M)]
  • "TinyOS: An Open Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks."
    Invited Tutorial, IEEE MDM, May 10, 2006.
    [PDF (25M)]
  • "T2: What the Second Generation Holds"
    CS294-11, Berkeley, 6 October 2005.
    [PDF (1.9M)]
  • "Embedded Sensor Architecture."
    EE282, Stanford, 14 October 2005.
    [PDF (24M)]
  • "Sensor Network Protocol Design and Implementation."
    CS268, UC Berkeley, 25 April 2005.
    [PDF (144K)]
  • "Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks."
    NSDI 2004.
    [PDF (10M)]
  • "The Internet vs. Sensor Nets."
    ICSI, 5 May 2004.
    [PDF (144K)]
  • "Evaluating Sensor Network Protocols."
    ICSI, 22 January 2003.
    [PDF (249K)]

Program Committees
2010: NSDI
2009: IPSN (Co-chair, IP track), SenSys, SOSP, HotPower (Co-chair)
2008: MODUS, IPSN, ICDCS, NSDR, SIGCOMM, OSDI
2007: IPSN, EmNets (co-chair), SIGCOMM, DMSN, SenSys, MidSens
2006: NetDB, IPSN, DCOSS, SenSys, RTSS

Quote

 Maria: i think end of 6.3 should be a sub sub section or something
Maria: i can kill some more orphans in the meantime
(pertaining to orphan words that waste space by taking a full line of text)