Raleigh News & Observer: Putting Brains in Dust

“Today when we think about small devices, we usually picture
cell phones or hand-held computers. But coming down the road, and
soon, are chips no bigger than grains of sand. We’ll use them in
vast numbers to lay down networks that can monitor everything from
weather patterns to land use. They’ll save us money, too, by
tracking how buildings allocate energy and helping us reduce power
consumption.

“Kris Pister, who runs a company dedicated to making this a
reality, was only joking when he tagged the technology ‘smart
dust.’ It was a take on other industry coinages such as ‘smart
houses,’ the idea being that computerizing something ordinary
allows us to do extraordinary things with it. But the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which funded Pister’s
work at the University of California, Berkeley, took it
seriously…”

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