About the talk: Over the 40 years, mobile communication has evolved in ways that were hard to foreseen. While we envisioned portable devices (such as the InfoPad) that would become our companion for discourse with our fellow humans, for information access and dissemination, and for many other functions such as wellness. However only science fiction foresaw that the wireless networks would expand around and into the human body, effectively providing a bridge between the cyber and biological worlds. While their primary function is to help detect and address deficiencies, malfunctions, and failures of the biological body, one can easily surmise that a next step would be enhance its operation and/or provide novel functionality. In all of this the brain plays a central role. Hence the title of this talk: how communications technology and technology in general will allow us to effectively communicate and interact with the brain.

About the speaker: Jan is a Professor in the Graduate School in the EECS Department the University of California at Berkeley, after being the holder of the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship at the same institute for over 30 years. He is a founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab, and has served as the Electrical Engineering Division Chair at Berkeley twice. In 2019, he also became the CTO of the System-Technology Co-Optimization (STCO) Division of IMEC, Belgium.

Prof. Rabaey has made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including low power integrated circuits, advanced wireless systems, mobile devices, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. Some of the systems he helped envision include the infoPad (a forerunner of the iPad), PicoNets and PicoRadios (IoT avant-la-lettre), the Swarm (IoT on steroids), Brain-Machine interfaces and the Human Intranet. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation distributed systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological worlds.

He is the primary author of the influential “Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective” textbook that has served to educate hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. He is the recipient of numerous awards among which the 2009 EDAA lifetime achievement award, is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.