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| Apr Jun |
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Intelligent Networks • Smart Objects • Design for Humans |
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| Thursday, May 12, 2005 |
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A Web of Sensors, Taking Earth's Pulse
Ecologists are planning to set up more than $1 billion worth of sensor web technology to study diverse environments with an eye toward saving the planet. Dr. Deborah Estrin with UCLA's Center for Embedded Network Sensing says the goal of such deployments is to create the ecological equivalent of MRI or CAT scans, while Dr. Alexandra Isern with the National Science Foundation (NSF) says sensor web technology is helping scientists understand "how different processes in the environment operate at different frequencies." Factors driving the sensor web wave include the support of institutions such as the NSF and the Defense Department, which have respectively financed planning and research into new sensor network deployments and the miniaturization of electronics to yield technologies such as motes and smart dust. Over 100 wireless motes, robots, computers, and cameras are linked into a network in California's wooded James Reserve to measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, soil moisture, and light levels, as well as track wildlife, plant growth, nesting activity, and the production of carbon dioxide in the soil. Other sensor web projects include RiverNet, which will use floating robots, wireless sensors, and distributed computers to track and improve the water quality of the Hudson River; EarthScope, an effort to study North America's continental formation and evolution to gain better insight into fault systems, earthquakes, mineral deposits, and volcanic activity; and Neptune, which involves the deployment of almost 2,000 miles of sensor, camera, and robot-equipped cables under the Pacific to study the ocean environment. Meanwhile, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) initiative's goal is to chart the spread of invasive species and predict shifts in the biosphere to augment land use and restoration strategies.
[ACM TechNews]
1:38:40 PM
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A Vision of Terror
Intelligence officers stand to benefit from new visualization tools that enable them to generate unique representations of digital communications that could help map out terrorist activity. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed Starlight 3.0, a new generation of software that graphically displays the relationships and interactions between documents that contain text, images, video, and audio, for the Homeland Security Department. Starlight is a redesign of earlier software that permits interactive analysis of larger datasets, the jettisoning of irrelevant content, and the addition of new data streams as they come in, according to PNNL chief scientist John Risch. The software enables a fourfold increase in the volume of documents that can be analyzed simultaneously, and allows the concurrent opening of multiple visualizations, which Risch says lets users see the time as well as the location of an activity's occurrence. Another PNNL effort involves the continual augmentation of IN-SPIRE software for deriving meaning from large datasets and allowing users to explore the likelihood of alternative hypotheses, says National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) director Jim Thomas, who says the software can search documents in multiple languages at the same time and permits the "discovery of the unexpected." Both Starlight and IN-SPIRE generate visualizations that graphically depict relationships between content by displaying them in multiple formats. Other organizations working on analytical software for the federal government include Intelligenxia, whose IxReveal software can track online message threads and provide answers to unasked queries, says Intelligenxia CTO Ren Mohan.
[ACM TechNews]
1:37:21 PM
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