History of the WISP Program Joshua R. Smith 1 Motivation This chapter tells the story of the early years of the wireless identification and sensing platform (WISP) project, which created what we believe to be the first far field RF-powered sensing and computing platform. This chapter is about the history of the program: what were the motivations, who was involved, how did one piece of the project lead to the next, where we the dead ends, what other research grew out of it, and what were the impacts? This sort of background can be difficult to extract from the research papers themselves, which typically present self-contained results and do not convey the context. The context and background of the WISP program may be worth reflecting on because it has been such a fruitful research vein and because it bears on meta-research questions such as how to build a community. These meta-research questions are important because they affect the amount of impact that the research ultimately has. While this present chapter focuses on the history and context of the WISP program, the next chapter “The Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform” is a detailed description of the WISP design and applications [16]. Also, this present chapter discusses just the work of my group and our collaborators. Other chapters of this book contain examples of related work by people who are not collaborators; some of these projects use the WISP, and some use different platforms. Projects on which my group did not collaborate are not discussed in this chapter, because I do not have the context. J.R. Smith Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: jrs@cs.washington.edu J.R. Smith (ed.), Wirelessly Powered Sensor Networks and Computational RFID, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6166-2 2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 13