SESA 2011

Program Outline

8:45 - 9:00 am Introductions and welcome

9:00 - 9:50 am Keynote Address: Prof. Rajesh Gupta, UCSD

9:50 - 10:15 Tea Break

10:15 - 11:15 am Session 1: Situational Awareness Applications for Sensor Network

11:15 - 12:15 pm Session 2: Sensor based Systems: Deployment challenges

12:15- 12:45 pm Workshop paper presentations 12:45 - 1:45 pm Lunch

1:45 - 2:30 pm Featured Industry Talk

2:30 - 3:30 pm Session 3: Energy Issues in Sensing

3:30 - 4:00 pm Session 4: Social Media for Situational Awareness

4:00- 4:20 pm Tea Break

4.20- 6:00 pm Workshop Panel: Challenges and Opportunities in Building Large Scale Sensor Applications

Program Details

8.45 - 9 am introductions and welcome

9 -9.50 am Keynote Address

Variation, Sensing and Sensibility of Energy Use in Cyber-Physical Systems,

Prof. Rajesh K. Gupta,

University of California, San Diego

Speaker Bio:

Rajesh K. Gupta is a professor and chair of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, and holds the QUALCOMM endowed chair. His research interests are in energy efficient systems that have taken turn towards large-scale energy use in recent years. He directs smart buildings/smart grids task force at UC San Diego in his role as associate director for the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2). His recent contributions include SystemC modeling and SPARK parallelizing high-level synthesis, both of which are publicly available and have been incorporated into industrial practice. Earlier Gupta lead or co-lead DARPA-sponsored efforts under the Data Intensive Systems (DIS) and Power Aware Computing and Communications (PACC) programs that demonstrated

architectural adaptation and compiler optimizations in building high performance and energy efficient system architectures. His ongoing efforts include energy-efficient data-centers and large scale computing using memory-coherent algorithmic accelerators and non-volatile storage systems. In recent years, Gupta and his students have received a best paper award at IEEE/ACM DCOSS'08 and a best demonstration award at IEEE/ACM IPSN/SPOTS'05. Gupta received a BTech in EE from IIT Kanpur, MS in EECS from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He currently serves as EIC of IEEE Embedded Systems Letters. Gupta is a Fellow of the IEEE.

9:50-10.15 Tea break

10.15 - 11.15 Session 1: Situational Awareness Applications for Sensor Network

Lunar seismic sensor network design for Chandrayaan-II mission,

Prof. Prabhat Ranjan

Dhirubhai Ambani - Institute of Information and Communication Technology

Geospatial situational awareness using sensor technologies

Prof. N. L. Sarda,

IIT, Bombay

11.15 - 12.15 Session 2: : Sensor based Systems: Deployment challenges

Ensuring Security in Sensor Deployments

Chinya V.Ravishankar, University of California, Riverside

Data Preservation Techniques in Sensor Networks,

Himanshu Gupta, SUNY Stonybrook

12:15- 12.45 Workshop paper presentations

Event Detection Across Multiple Social Media Streams, Seema Nagar and Anupam Joshi.

Automation of resource utilization in a sensor network, Manjunath Iyer, Shyam Vasudev Rao and Pandit Pattabhirama

12:45 - 1.45 lunch

1.45 - 2:30 Featured Industry Talk

Smarter Energy: The Promise of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems,

Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, IBM India

2:30 - 3:30 Session 3: Energy Issues in Sensing (session Chair: Amarjeet)

Addressing the Energy Challenge for Deep Context Sensing in Indoor Spaces, Prof. Archan Misra,

School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

An Energy-Efficient Framework for Joint k-coverage and Geographic Forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Prof. Habib M. Ammari

Hofstra University

3:30 - 4:00 Social Media & Agents for Situational Awareness

Prof. Anupam Joshi

Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County

4:00- 4:20 Tea Break

4.20- 6:00 Workshop Panel: Challenges and Opportunities in Building Large Scale Sensor Applications

Recent advancements in sensing technologies (together with sensors embedded in mobile phones) have resulted in sensors becoming an integral part of our lives. Research community both in academia and in the industry all over the world are working on variety of aspects of the sensor enabled technologies - from novel sensor design, sensor platforms, sensor stream processing, software architectures for sensor applications, mechanisms for creating awareness from sensory inputs, to novel sensor applications.

With multiple experts from academics, research lab and industry who have had several years of experience in sensor networks deployment, this panel will focus on unique challenges and opportunities that differences in context and environments (a mix of cultural, social, legal aspects) offer to sensor driven situational awareness systems. Some key questions to be addressed are:

1. How applications, opportunities, and use cases differ across different contexts (e.g., India versus the western context)

2. What new challenges in terms of instrumentation arise for deployment due to differences in cultural, and social contexts.

3.How can we promote and grow a more global research community on sensor based systems which has a more balanced participation and cross fertilization of ideas.

Confirmed Panelists:

Amarjeet Singh, IIIT Delhi

Sajal Das, UTA and NSF

Deva Senapathi, IBM India Research Lab

Rajen Bhatt, Bosch

Moderator: Sharad Mehrotra (UCI)

Talk Abstracts:

Variation, Sensing and Sensibility of Energy Use in Cyber-Physical Systems,

Prof. Rajesh K. Gupta

University of California, San Diego

Abstract: Energy is a precious societal resource, and increasingly rated for its 'quality' or lack thereof as a contributor to greenhouse gases. Modern electrical energy systems operate at the intersection of technological advances in microelectronics, communications, and control. Underlying the microelectronics is the physical reality of materials and processes that operate at molecular level and their growing variations on electrical and architectural measures that we have so far taken for granted. From individual components and systems such as computer systems to their aggregates and enclosures such as data centers and buildings, microelectronic advances in radios, processors, storage and networking are enabling low-cost and effective embedded sensing and its use in operational controls. In the context of energy distribution systems, this trend has led to popular visions of 'smart electrical grids' that dynamically match generation, transmission, and storage for the most efficient and reliable usage of electromagnetic energy.

This talk examines the evolution of microelectronics and its integration with the societal scale systems -- in particular, the electrical grid -- that can be used as testing grounds for the prototyping and testing of smart grid technologies. Using the prototype of a microgrid at the campus of the University of California at San Diego, we present energy data that points to promising methods for operation of various types of buildings that

leverage coordinated use of sensing, information processing, and building HVAC systems.

Lunar Seismic Sensor Network Design for Chandrayaan-II Mission

Prof. Prabhat Ranjan

Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar (India)

Planetary Exploration generally involve very remote locations and expensive data collection. Wireless Sensor Network has been discussed in the literature for planetary exploration but has not been tried out in its full form till today. DA-IICT and PLANEX Group, PRL have been working towards development of a Lunar Seismic Sensor Network as a possible payload for Chandrayaan-II and future missions. Due to mission constraints and requirements, this needs a very different design process.

Chandrayaan-II mission consists of a Lander and a Rover. It is planned to use Rover to explore the surface (and if possible subsurface) of Moon. We have designed a Lunar Seismic Sensor network consisting of four nodes to collect seismic data over a period of 20 days and provide local as well as global seismic information. This can be used to understand subsurface structure near the landing site and would help in future mission plans as well as any structures that may be built on moon.

In-situ lunar seismic measurements have been done only during Apollo mission nearly 40 years back. In Chandrayaan-II or other similar missions, one does not have the opportunity to make deployment at multiple landing sites. So we plan to use Rover to distribute a collection of sensor network nodes over a limited region. Rover being planned has very limited mobility of maximum 10 meters/day. This restricts us to placing nodes to a maximum of 10 meters separation. We have planned to have a collection of only 4 nodes due to mass restriction on payload. Out of these two nodes would be embedded in Lunar regolith (surface) to about 10-15 cms. One node would be placed on Lander and one would be placed on Rover. In this talk, we discuss the design challenges and possible solutions of this system.

Sensor-base Active Environments with Ontologies for Action

Prof. N. L. Sarda

IIT, Bombay

Abstract: There have been tremendous R&D activities in the recent past in design of various types of sensors and their deployment for capturing variety of real-world events and activities based on the realization that getting such data in real-time plays a crucial

part in developing effective monitoring and control applications. There have also been significant efforts, particularly from Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), in defining standards for facilitating discovery, access, processing and inter-operability of sensor data. OGC has also conducted many real-life proof-of-concept projects to demonstrate these standards. Such standards allow us to focus on applications which can collect such data, interpret them and take meaningful actions with nil or minimal human intervention. We view such applications and the underlying sensor web as defining an Active Environment. To achieve the goal of building such Active (application) Environments, we need to create a higher layer that captures an ontology for interpretation of (sensor) data and action. We are experimenting with building of such layers for a select set of applications, which may help us to generalize them into a re-usable framework. In this paper, we present two case studies, one related to identification and tracking of vehicles (typically by police departments) and the other for advising farmers about activities required for farming in the context of their crop, field and environmental conditions. We illustrate how ontology captures meaning of the data streams received from sensors and then identify control actions required by enforcement agencies or farmers. Such approaches need to be extensible so that newer measurements and sensors for them can be incorporated in the environment seamlessly.

Ensuring Security in Sensor Deployments

Prof Chinya V. Ravishankar,

Univ. of California, Riverside

Abstract: Sensors could be deployed either in a pre-determined or in an ad-hoc fashion to collect a variety of data of significance from the security perspective. We will describe the results of ongoing work at the University of California, Riverside, aimed at each of these two application areas. In the first part of this talk, we will outline work on using a network of cameras deployed at strategic locations within a building to collect data on activities inside it and in its vicinity, aimed at recognizing individuals and generating information on building intent. The techniques we are investigating incorporate biometric techniques, including face and gait recognition. In the second part of this talk, we will discuss work on ensuring secure communications in on-demand sensor deployments, in the presence of adversaries who mount various forms of active attack. We will discuss experimental and theoretical results on the resilience of such networks to random and selective sensor compromises by the adversary.

Data Preservation Techniques in Sensor Networks,

Prof. Himanshu Gupta,

SUNY Stonybrook

In the context of smart-dust type networks, wherein the network consists of a large number of cheap and unreliable nodes, we will look at techniques for preservation of generated data in the network, in face of node failures. In particular, we focus on the type of node failures that have explicit spatial shapes such as circles or rectangles (e.g., modeling a bomb attack or a river overflow). We consider two different schemes for introducing redundancy in the network, viz., by simply replicating data or by using erasure codes, with the objective being to minimize the communication cost incurred to build such data redundancy. In our work, we prove the NP-hardness of these problems, and design centralized and distributed algorithms that yield an approximate solution in uniform random networks.

Addressing the Energy Challenge for Deep Context Sensing in Indoor Spaces Prof. Archan Misra,

School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

Abstract: Many applications in areas ranging from health monitoring to targeted retailing and advertising would benefit from the ability to use a smartphone and associated sensors to extract rich context about an individual's activities in physical spaces. Unfortunately, the wireless communication and event processing overheads on a battery-powered mobile device continue to bedevil the practical realization of a continuous context-extraction capability. In this talk, I will first describe our recent and ongoing work on energy-efficient context sensing, including the paradigms of context-triggered deep monitoring and acquisition cost-aware query processing. I will then describe the vision of the recently-started Living Analytics Research Center (LARC) and outline future approaches for context awareness that combine on-board processing with collaborative P2P signalling among smartphones.

An Energy-Efficient Framework for Joint k-coverage and Geographic Forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks Habib M. Ammari

Wireless Sensor and Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (WiSeMAN) Research Lab

Department of Computer Science, Hofstra University

Abstract: It is well known that sensor duty-cycling is an important mechanism that helps densely deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) save energy. On the other hand, geographic forwarding is an efficient scheme for WSNs as it requires maintaining only local topology information to forward data to their destination. Most of geographic forwarding protocols assume that all sensors are always on (or active) during forwarding. However, such an assumption is unrealistic for real-world applications where sensors are switched on or off. In this talk, we describe our cover-sense-inform (CSI) framework for k-covered WSNs, where each point in a sensor field is covered by at least k active sensors. In CSI, k-coverage, sensor scheduling, and data forwarding are jointly considered. First, we characterize k-coverage in WSNs. Second, we propose a scheduling protocol for k-covered WSNs while minimizing the number of active sensors. Third, we propose the first design of geographic forwarding protocols for duty-cycled k-covered WSNs with and without data aggregation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our joint k-coverage and geographic forwarding protocols and compare them to a k-coverage configuration protocol (CCP) with a geographic forwarding protocol on top of it, such as BVGF, which we have slightly updated in such a way that it considers energy for a fair comparison. Simulation results show that our joint protocols outperform CCP+BVGF.

Social Media and Agents for Situational Awareness

Prof. Anupam Joshi

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Abstract: Extreme events are phenomena (natural or otherwise) that have a significant impact on society- for instance in terms of lives or economics. With an increasingly "instrumented and interconnected" world, we can try to detect such events, and be predictive and proactive in our responses so as to mitigate their adverse impact. Situational Awareness is a key component of this process, enabling both the commanders that direct responses, and responders that carry them out, to be more efficient and effective. In this talk, we will touch upon two related elements. The first is using social media data streams (human-as-sensor) to supplement the more traditional physical sensors in event detection. The second is the use of agent oriented approaches to help take data from a variety of sources and come up with a common operational picture.