Pister, Kristofer

Kristofer Pister was awarded the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation for his successful pioneering achievements in developing and inspiring the commercialization of “Smart Dust”, a wireless network of miniature sensors. The network consists of a series of highly miniaturized motes, each of which contains a sensor, about the size of a grain of rice that detects and records things; a miniature transmitter/receiver that communicates with other motes; and a battery about the size of an aspirin that allows operation for longer than a year. These features allow the network to operate in an autonomous, self-discovering, and self-configuring fashion. Applications that will be changed forever are almost too numerous to enumerate. According to Dr. Tariq Samad, Corporate Fellow at Honeywell, “Professor Pister envisioned a future where pervasive ‘dust’ motes self-configure, self-adapt, and auto-network with other motes to provide sensor data for monitoring building health, ensuring industrial safety, improving industrial processes, sensing precursors to earthquakes, and safeguarding the environment”.