Director, Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, Professor UCLA

Inducted in 2008

Deborah Estrin is a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech. She served as a professor of computer science with a joint appointment in electrical engineering at UCLA. She held the Jon Postel chair in computer networks and is the founding director of the NSF funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).

In 2007, Deborah was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a fellow of the ACM, AAAS, and the IEEE. She has served on numerous panels for the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences/NRC, and DARPA.

She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and 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.

Deborah 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. She was awarded the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2007. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

In 1987, Deborah 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 the network and routing protocols for 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 90s, Deborah has focused on embedded networked sensing systems, with a particular focus on applications to environmental monitoring.

This work includes participatory-sensing systems based on the 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 carry around in our pockets or on our belts-cell phones. For Deborah’s incredible academic and professional achievements, she was recognized in 2003 by "Popular Science" as one of their "Brilliant 10."

Deborah has been a co-principal investigator on many NSF and DARPA funded projects. She chaired a 1997&ndash98 ISAT study on sensor networks and the 2001 NRC study on networked embedded computing, which produced the report embedded everywhere.

She presided over the Sensors and Sensor Networks subcommittee of the NEON Network Design Committee. Deborah 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.

Deborah received her PhD in 1985 for computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her BS in 1980 from U.C. Berkeley. She also received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and a degree honoris causa at EPFL in 2008. Before joining UCLA, she was a member of the University of Southern California, Computer Science Department.

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