Matt Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He is also co-founder of the RFID systems firm ThingMagic Inc (acquired by Trimble Navigation), the energy conservation firm Zensi (acquired by Belkin), and the home sensing company SNUPI Inc. Matt's research interests include RFID, energy efficiency at the physical layer of wireless communication, and the physics of sensing and actuation. Matt holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where he was a Motorola Fellow, as well as S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Matt has 13 issued and over 30 patents pending before the USPTO.
By 2005, more transistors were grown (~1018) than grains of rice, representing approximately 150 million transistors per human . These transistors are omnipresent in the developed world, appearing primarily in the form of computing systems ranging in scale from the simple microcontroller that controls a toaster to the billions of transistors in each of the world's hundreds of millions of PCs. We already live among the machines. How can we live together more cooperatively?
My work is focused on connecting people and machines from a physical and logical layer perspective, and allowing them to live and work cooperatively in the physical world. I explore this new frontier of computing through the design and field use of systems ranging from automated weather probes that communicate by satellite the weather on the South Col of Mt. Everest, to a system for tracking, classifying, and visualizing the motion of stage performers as they juggle, dance, and play musical instruments, and most recently the design of ultra-low power and cost RFID tags and readers for identifying and tracking millions of goods as they pass through the supply chain.
The common technology thread is the acquisition, communication, and classification of the identity, state, and location of people and objects. I span the traditional boundary between analog and digital systems, and am beginning to tackle the boundary between the digital and biological worlds...
 Semiconductor Industry Association Annual Report, 2005, www.sia-online.org