Niwat Thepvilojanapong Assistant Professor School of Engineering Mie University E-mail: wat [at] u-netlab [dot] jp

Niwat's research focus on urban sensing and wireless sensor networks. His publication list is here.

• Urban Sensing: People are likely to search things related to their daily lives in the real world ranging from straight-forward queries to complex ones. Examples of such queries are weather forecast, a nearby Thai restaurant, route navigation, and so on. To response to such real-world queries, a collaboration of independent sensor networks is a possible and promising solution. OSOITE (Overlay-network Search Oriented for Information about Town Events) provides an architecture for realizing such real-world search by exploiting a collaboration of heterogeneous sensor networks.

• Wireless Sensor Networks: Data communication is a fundamental requirement of sensing applications. We have developed a protocol for collecting and disseminating data in wireless sensor networks that uses proactive route discovery and reactive route maintenance together with security mechanisms in order to enable practical deployment of wireless sensor networks. Network configurations composed of path discovery and maintenance are autonomously done by each node without direct human intervention.

• Multi-Robot Sensor Networks: We have developed WISER (Wireless Interactive SEnsing Robot) protocol for mobile sensor networks that discerns controlled mobility as a mean of data transfer, in addition to wireless transmission, to make data delivery possible in partially connected networks. WISER aims to minimize delay and energy consumption based on policy of each application by introducing an explicit collaboration of mobile robots and treating continuous data as a session instead of single packet.

• Ubiquitous Computing: We have developed applications/systems for supporting our daily lives in ubiquitous society. One of those is WINFO (Wearable micro-INFOrmation broadcaster), a system presenting environmental information map for urban people. WINFO aggregates emitted data from a person and map the information as a distributed map. There are three goals in WINFO: device scalability, information scalability, and resource scalability. Device scalability means client devices can acquire the amount of information depending on their screen size and CPU power. A device with richer resources will present finer information on its display. Information scalability is dealing with the dynamic behavior of data. If the data has a large change either in temporal or spatial axes, the granularity of the data should be small. Finally, resource scalability determines the frequency of sensing and transmission depending on the available remaining battery. To enhance the scalability, we also consider data compression for sensed data.

• Inter-Vehicle Communications: To provide safe and comfortable driving, we have developed Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocols for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). IVCs can help reduce the probability and severity of car accidents by providing some sort of appropriate warning to the driver. A vehicle periodically broadcasts its information (location, speed, direction, etc.), and other vehicles use the received information to alert drivers, helping them become aware of the existence of other vehicles. Packets are relayed by intermediate vehicles in order to provide indirect communications among distant vehicles. Although the relay expands the area where packets can be delivered, it introduces new communication overheads. Therefore, we have developed IVC protocols to control packet relays by suppressing redundant relays while still achiving prompt and reliable communications.

• Internet Measurement: The diversity of the Internet makes bottleneck bandwidth measurement challenging. We proposed a technique to measure the bottleneck link bandwidths along a path without modifications of existing routers. The distribution of estimated bandwidths of a path is used to deal with the problem of cross traffics. In addition, a technique to change transmission rate according to detected multiple bottleneck bandwidths has been proposed. We have conducted several experiments of the Internet measurement, and studied Internet behavior including delay, bandwidth, and path rerouting. We have applied knowledge of Internet behavior for peer-to-peer networked games.

Currently, Niwat is an assitant professor at Graduate School of Engineering, Mie University. He is a member of the Technical Committee on Information Networks, IEICE (May 2008 - May 2012), the ACM and the IEICE.

Niwat holds a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He received his M.E. in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Tokyo, and B.E. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering from the Chulalongkorn University (Thailand). After spending 2 years as a research engineer at the KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., he joined the Tokyo Denki University as a project associate professor. At the same time, he was also a researcher of the OSOITE project, CREST, JST. He was a recipient of the Japanese Government (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) Scholarship (2000-2005).

• Seminar in Computer Network II (Fall 2010)
• Advanced Programming Exercise II (Fall 2010)
• D7508: Information Engineering Practise II (Fall 2010)

• Technical committee of societies or groups
  • Information Networks (IN), Communications Society (CS), IEICE (May 2008 - May 2012).
  • Human Probe (HPB), Human Communication Engineering Group (HCG), IEICE (April 2009 - March 2011).
• Program co-chairs
  • The 2010 International Workshop on Ubiquitous Service Platforms (IWUSP 2010).
  • The 3rd International Workshop on SensorWebs, Databases and Mining in Networked Sensing Systems (SWDMNSS 2009).
• Technical program comittee
  • The European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2011).
  • The 31st IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2010) [Wireless Sensor Networks Track].
  • The 16th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2010).
  • The 10th Annual International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT 2010).
  • The 5th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA 2010).
  • The 7th International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS 2010).
  • The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing (SUTC2010).
  • The Asian Workshop on Sensing and Visualization of City-Human Interaction (AWSVCI 2009).
  • The 15th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2009).
  • The 9th Annual International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT 2009).
  • The International Workshop on Network Assurance and Security Services in Ubiquitous Environments (NASSUE-2009).
  • The 6th International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS 2009).
  • The 1st International Workshop on Mobile Urban Sensing (MobiUS 2009).
  • The 5th International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS 2008).

Full publication list is here.

• Askus: Amplifying Mobile Actions. Shin'ichi Konomi, Niwat Thepvilojanapong, Ryohei Suzuki, Susanna Pirttikangas, Kaoru Sezaki, and Yoshito Tobe. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2009), pp.202-219, Nara, Japan, May 2009. Acceptance rate: 18.4% (27/147).

• Observing Real-World Attention by a Laser Scanner. Yasunori Yakiyama, Niwat Thepvilojanapong, Masayuki Iwai, Oru Mihirogi, Kazunori Umeda, and Yoshito Tobe. IPSJ Transactions on Advanced Computing Systems (ACS), Vol.2, No.1, pp.173-186, March 2009. (Funai Young Researcher Award)

• Smart Environments for Occupancy Sensing and Services. Susanna Pirttikangas, Yoshito Tobe, and Niwat Thepvilojanapong. Handbook of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, Eds. Hideyuki Nakashima, Hamid Aghajan, and Juan Carlos Augusto, Springer, ISBN: 978-0-387-93807-3 (Print) 978-0-387-93808-0 (Online), pages 825-849, 2010.

• A Study of Cooperative Human Probes in Urban Sensing Environments. Niwat Thepvilojanapong, Shin'ichi Konomi, and Yoshito Tobe. IEICE Transactions on Communications, Vol.E93-B, No.11, November 2011. (To Appear)

Six patents are granted in Japan.