Some of you might have already attended/seen Jeffrey Sharkey's talk Coding for Life -- Battery Life, That Is from Google I/O 2009, but hopefully all of you get that power consumption of your Android app can play a significant role in the overall user experience.

For our March 30th event, we are very fortunate to have Frank Maker, Eric Jung, and Yichuan Wang, a trio of very smart PhD students, come and share what they've learned about power consumption / battery life on mobile/Android devices in their years of research.

Specifically, they plan to talk about:

• Mobile Architecture - Talk about differences with desktop/laptop computers, where power goes, etc.
  
• Measuring Power/Energy - difference between energy and power, battery technology, why the problem isn't going away anytime soon
  
• Software Optimizations - different ideas you can use to lower the power consumption of your application
  

Marakana will be sponsoring food and drinks for this event. We'll also give away an Android book, courtesy of O'Reilly, plus a couple of T-Shirts (from Sun).

About Frank Maker - Main Speaker

Frank Maker is a PhD student at the University of California, Davis studying Embedded Systems focusing on low power mobile platforms. He has expertise in cross-layer embedded systems work ranging from low-level device drivers to high level application. Previously, he worked in embedded automotive electronics with BMW and Motorola Automotive. Currently he is a member of the Micropower Circuits and Systems Group (MCSG) working on: cell phone solar panel power supplies, processes for repurposing used cell phones and a cell phone computing cluster. In addition to his research work, he also runs an smartphone consulting company, Handy Codeworks LLC, focusing on the Android and iPhone platforms.

About Eric Jung - "Using user-profiles to inform design"

Eric Jung is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at University of California, Davis. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. from the same university, in 2006 and 2009 respectively. His research interests include wireless networking and context-based phone resource optimization.

About Yichuan Wang - "New Synchronization and Authentication mechanism in Android 2.0"

A PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at University of California, Davis, Yichuan Wang's research interest includes mobile Internet, and dynamic optimization. He received his B.S from Zhejiang University in 2006. After working for Nokia, he got M.S from Georgia State University in 2009.