Suman Banerjee, University of Wisconsin, Madison Tuesday, October 20- 3pm Computer Science 402 ParaDrop: Enabling Third Party Apps in Home WiFi Gateways for Fun and Profit Over the last few years, we have been building a new home WiFi router platform that can allow 3rd party applications and services to be deployed on it. The system, called Paradrop, is all in software and is an extreme form of the popular notion known as edge computing. It leverages popular concepts of virtualization and software-defined networking. It also integrates techniques for better monitoring, management, and mitigation of RF interference experienced in these environments. It hopes to be to the home router market what the smartphones were to the cellphone market. We believe that ParaDrop can be a significant enabler for the emerging services for smarter homes that take advantage of Internet of Things applications. Furthermore, the platform can also be leveraged for delivering a more hands-on educational content on emerging topics, such as Internet-of-Things, mobile development, mobile and wireless systems design, and even basic computer networking. In this talk, I will describe some of the technical developments in creating this platform and outline our ongoing activities. Suman Banerjee is an Professor in Computer Sciences at UW-Madison where he is the founding director of the WiNGS laboratory which broadly focuses on research in wireless and mobile networking systems. He received his undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland. He is the inaugural recipient of the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar award and a recipient of the NSF Career Award. He is a recipient of multiple award papers at various conferences, such as ACM MobiCom, ACM CoNEXT, and IEEE Dyspan. Further, technology developed by Prof. Banerjee have won various accolades including the first prize at the Wisconsin Governor's Business Plan Competition in 2011 and in the Interdigital Innovation Challenge in 2012. He is currently serving as the chair of ACM SIGMOBILE.