Sensing Opportunity.

This article focuses on the achievements of Kris Pister, CEO of Dust Inc. To Kris Pister, a cubic inch is outsize. "I could put a cell phone in an earring or a tongue stud," says the 39-year-old professor-turned-entrepreneur. Fortunately, he instead builds vast wireless networks of self-organizing, millimeter-size sensors. Within a few years his little chips may help change everything from the cost of construction to how we fight forest fires--even the way we communicate. Pister is founder and chief executive of Dust Inc., a Berkeley, Calif. firm he formed in January while on leave from the town's university. The son of a Berkeley civil engineering professor, Pister first built tiny self-propelled robots, such as a mechanical fly that could take wing and transmit data. In his new scheme, each Smart Dust sensor (which Pister calls a "mote") is about the size of a character in this sentence. It contains a device that measures such things as temperature, motion and light intensity, and it sports a miniature antenna and a radio with a range of 10 to 50 meters. Intel Corp. has funded a company called Crossbow Technology, and companies such as Millennial Net and Ember also are pursuing wireless sensor networks.