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| Mar Jun |
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Ambient Informatics develops cross-disciplinary approaches to the design and development of next-generation systems that address the complexities and of real-time, real-world information, and effective human interaction. |
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| Thursday, May 27, 2004 |
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Sensors of the World, Unite!: Good intro to this topic, quoting an Alun Anderson Economist article, and providing other references. "Another information revolution is emerging, driven by billions of tiny and intelligent sensors able to self-organize into scalable and fault-tolerant networks. Taken individually, these sensors have small brains, but using billions of them is an entirely other story." [Ken Novak: Wireless remote data]
11:37:56 PM
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Biomimicry yields nanomaterials: For electronics, radar deflection, and solar cells: "Daniel Morse of the University of California, Santa Barbara, said he has harnessed the ability of the lowly sponge to develop silicon-based, photovoltaic devices. The organisms "fabricate beautifully structured, 3-dimensionally organized high performance materials," he said. They accomplish this under benign conditions -- unlike those used in the human fabrication of silicon chips, which can involve high temperatures and pressures and polluting materials. Morse and colleagues discovered a class of proteins, which he nicknamed "silicateins," that direct the manipulation of silica in sponges found in the waters just outside his California lab. He said he discovered silacatein enzymes can act as nanomachines to make titanium dioxide by aligning titanium and oxygen atoms, thereby turning the material into "one of the most efficient photovoltaic converters of sunlight to electricity yet known." " [Ken Novak: Nanoscale technology]
9:05:18 PM
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""Wireless sensor networks are for real" - Intel
"The sensors can be of any type - motion, temperature, vibration, light, sound and so on. The combined Mote and sensor form a sensor node which sends information via Bluetooth directly (or via another sensor node) to a gateway node (Intel's Stargate hardware) which will then send information to other gateway nodes or host computers (PDA, laptop or desktop PC) via wireless 802.11b networking.
The Motes can work in a heterogeneous, multi-layered network. By using different wireless technologies, the range of the network can be extended and the battery life of the tiny Motes can be extended by offloading network connection responsibilities to the larger gateway nodes.
The network is self-organising too - Kling demonstrated this by re-arranging the positions of the Motes and resetting the system. Within seconds, the Motes reorganised their network topology and formed evenly spread layers, identifiable through colour-keyed LED lights which showed each node's layer. Very clever."
[The Star - Malaysia]
6:54:38 PM
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Sensor technology comes in from the cold
'We are using "Subglacial Probes" beneath a glacier, communicating to
the surface via radio links. They contain various sensors and their
position and orientation is sensed by the surface system. This is the
first time wireless probes have been put inside glaciers and it involves
many challenges. The systems must feed data back to a server in the UK
and contend with communication loss, power loss, noise and bad weather!'
[Innovations Report]
6:54:33 PM
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