Nathan Stohs's Contact Details

Nathan Stohs's Company Details

The Samraksh Company was founded by Dr. Anish Arora and Dr. Kenneth W. Parker in 2005. Samraksh is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word, समरक्ष, which means collaborative defense (especially for a righteous cause). The Samraksh Company is devoted to the idea that large groups of miniature computers, widely dispersed and networked together can collaborate to accomplish many tasks that can't be accomplished with a few powerful sensors or computers on a traditional network. This is especially true of tasks that depend on environmental awareness or physical sensing. For these tasks proximity and local adaptation often create an opportunity to easily harness a small amount of "just the right" information that is far more powerful than the opportunities afforded by the large amount of information or complexity provided by more centralized, more powerful, and more traditional approaches. Our expertise stems from the marriage of military applications and world class academic research. We played prominent roles in the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) Autonomous Negotiating Teams (ANTS) Program and the DARPA Network Embedded Systems Technology (NEST) Program. We have also directly consulted to various DoD commands and worked for the U.S. Border Patrol. However, we are deeply motivated by the dual use opportunities created by recent advances in large scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). These opportunities extend well beyond simple surveillance into networking and distributed computing in a wide range of infrastructure deprived settings.