Neal Jackson, PhD

I am currently a research engineer at Blue Iris Labs, a health sensing startup founded by Erik, Will, and me.

I was previously a:

• PhD student at University of California, Berkeley in EECS
• Undergraduate student at University of Michigan in CSE

During my time at Michigan and Berkeley, I worked with Prabal Dutta and Lab11. My research is focused on developing tools and frameworks for the application-driven design of energy-harvesting wireless sensors. To this end, I developed a long-lifetime indoor sensor mote named Permamote. Permamote’s design was informed by a custom wireless sensor energy simulator that incorporates real energy harvesting traces and platform benchmarks to estimate system energy utilization, lifetime, and availability. Permamote combines energy-harvesting, a backing primary cell battery, and the newest, lowest power components to achieve reliable operation over a greater than 10 year lifetime. Permamote performs ambient environmental sensing, but its heirarchical and modular power supply can be reused to serve various application specific designs.

Most recently, I adapted the platform and created Permacam to support an ultra-low power, long lifetime camera for wireless, long-lifetime computer vision tasks.

News

• 12/2022: I graduated! My dissertation can be found here
• 08/2022: I married the beautiful and goofy Taryn Farber!
• 09/2021: I moved back to Ann Arbor, Michigan
• 04/2020: Won the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for teaching EECS149 in Fall 2019
• 02/2020: I got a dog! Her name is Bella and she’s wonderful
• 11/2019: I started working with Erik Page & Associates, what would later become Blue Iris Labs
• 04/2019: My paper Capacity over Capacitance for Reliable Energy Harvesting Sensors appeared at IPSN’19