SESA 2011

Advances in sensing and multimedia data capture technologies coupled with mechanisms for low power wireless networking have enabled the possibility of creating deeply instrumented physical spaces. Embedded sensors and data capture devices in such environments digitally capture the state of the evolving physical systems and processes creating situational awareness of the activities in the instrumented space. Situational awareness, in a broad sense, refers to a continuum of knowledge that captures the current state of the physical environments being observed, to future projected states of these observed environments. Such situational awareness offers opportunities to realizing new functionalities and / or bringing transformational improvements in many application domains.

Such opportunities include delivery of the right emergency response services that minimize impact and prevent cascades, smart surveillance technologies that prevent emergencies, intelligent transportation systems that reduce traffic delays and congestion, energy aware smart buildings, self diagnostic/self healing physical infrastructure, blackout free electricity generation and distribution systems that minimize waste, telemonitoring of elderly patients to reduce cost of medical services and improve its quality, sustainable management of critical infrastructure, new environment aware applications for urban landscapes, etc.

While the potential of sensor enabled situational awareness is well recognized, its realization poses numerous challenges which are being actively pursued by the research communities in different disciplines ranging from embedded computing, networking, distributed systems, middleware, data management, software engineering, machine learning, to privacy and security. The purpose of this workshop is to serve as a multidisciplinary forum to bring researchers from diverse disciplines to discuss the state of the art, identify new emerging challenges and opportunities.