Director of the Cogent Computing ARC, Dr. Elena Gaura and Senior Research Fellow, Dr. James Brusey were invited to present the Centre's research to students and staff at the Mobile Research Centre at Bremen University. The talks focused on the challenges faced and requirements for designing and deploying real life wireless sensor networks (WSNs) while examining developments and ideas put forward in the research. During the two day event, which ran from Feb 12 to 13, 2009, two body sensor network systems for posture monitoring and bomb disposal were demonstrated to attendees. The presentations are available for download here: Bremen Staff Presentation Bremen Student Presentation
The Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) has selected Cogent to appear as a Centre of Excellence Centre for UK Research in Wireless Sensing in their forthcoming DBERR UK Instrumentation Capability Guide. The Guides aim to promote UK’s technical excellence in the area to overseas audiences and have been very useful in raising awareness of the sector within UK business itself while highlighting the best companies and organisations in various domains.
They target primarily export support staff working in the UK and in British Embassies overseas promoting UK Trade & Investment and are used as a reference guide when meeting with potential customers for the sector, companies considering investment into the UK, government bodies, academia, business and regional development agencies .
For more information go to the DBERR UK website .
Mike Allen, a PhD research student at the Cogent Computing ARC at Coventry University delivered a presentation entitled "On-line acoustic source localisation with VoxNet" on Thursday 4th December at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science.
The talk described the development, deployment, evaluation cycle for an interesting distributed acoustic source localisation application: in-situ monitoring of animals. The end users of this application are bioacoustics researchers, who aim to learn about the behaviour of animals based on the calls they make and the locations/situations they are made in. The application is built using VoxNet, a hardware and software platform for distributed, high data rate acoustic sensing. The platform supports the provision of on-line position estimates, in order that user can act on them in-situ (for example to take a picture of the animal of interest).
Learning from a succession of VoxNet-based network deployments, several approaches to improve the timeliness of this system are proposed (Adaptation of processing and Lazy Grouping), intelligently distributing the burden of processing between the sink and nodes in the network.
Whilst the proposed improvements have been evaluated for this particular animal monitoring application, their suitability is more general to a wider class of acoustic localisation applications.
Mike expects to graduate in 2009, and has taken a position as a post-graduate research associate with the Singapore MiT Alliance for Research and Technology in Singapore (SMART), as part of the Centre for Environment Sensing and Modelling (CENSAM). He will continue to work with high data rate sensing systems, for water quality monitoring.
Mike's presentation is available here: SouthamptonPresentation_12_2008
Given that some theoretical approaches to WSN design treat, by and large, all target applications as aspects of the same problem, subsequent proposed designs are complex and sophisticated. When they form the basis for practical deployments, these designs have to be considerably stripped down. Practical deployment design processes can be considerably sped up by starting with simpler systems that are more focused on smaller sets of target applications. The design concerns specific to that application set will naturally lead the design process in terms of selecting what off-the-shelf hardware and software can be used, and what bespoke components need to be developed to satisfy the application as a whole.
The tutorial at iSWC supports the exposition of design techniques and design choices by focusing on an example from within the area of Embedded Body Sensor Networks.
Dr. Elena Gaura, Reader in Pervasive Computing and Director of Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre at Coventry University, and Dr. James Brusey, Senior Research Fellow successfully organised and delivered a one-day tutorial on end-to-end systems design for safety critical applications. The tutorial run as part of the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA from September 28 to October 1, 2008. The target group for the tutorial included designers and developers of real-life sensor networks applications for the Body Sensing domain; developers of integrated miniature, embedded technology for smart textiles;evaluators of wearable technologies; end-users of body-related embedded technology (clinicians, physiotherapists, bio-mechanics engineers.
More details of the event are available here.
Tony Mo was awarded the joint EPSRC - Vibro-Meter UK CASE project studentship in July of 2008 and joined Cogent as a PhD student in September 2008. His work is concerned with development of deployable wireless networked instrumentation for health monitoring of gas turbine jet engines. Tony graduated in Summer 2008 with a First Class Honours degree in Electronics from Coventry University.
Dr. Elena Gaura, Director of the Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre, co-chaired the first National Showcase on Wireless Sensor Networks on July 1st, 2008. The event was organized by the Sensors & Instrumentation Knowledge Transfer Network (SIKTN) and held at the National Physics Laboratory, Teddington. The event’s invited speakers were Prof. Ian Marshall (Lancaster University), Dr. D.K. Arvind (Edinburgh University) and Dr. Kirk Martinez (Southampton University).
Of the 10 system demonstrators accepted at the WiSig National Showcase, 3 were delivered by Cogent’s members, as follows:
The event was attended by over 100 academics and industry representatives, and was rated as having been an extremely successful venture.It is planned to run again in 2009, possibly with international participation.
For the fifth year running, Dr Elena Gaura from the Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre organised the two day Symposium on Sensors and Systems in the Modelling and Simulation of Microsystems as part of the (MSM) strand of the NSTI Nanotechnology conference (Nanotech 2008).
The conference, the largest of its kind worldwide attracted this year in excess of 6000 participants and took place in Boston,Massachusetts, USA, from June 1st-5th. The symposium had 6 invited and keynote speakers, including Dr. Lewis Girod (MIT), Dr. Alberto Sanna (San Rafaelle Institute, Milan) and Dr. Jerry Hallmark (Motorola – Mobile devices division). The symposium attracted over 300 participants and had a program of 80 oral and 30 poster presentations.
Dr. Gaura chaired the symposium and a number of presentations were made by Cogent members in the area of system design and applications of Wireless Sensor Networks.
Dr Gaura said: "Nanotech 2008 continued its tradition of high standards as a global showcase for research. My continued involvement as organiser of one the major symposiums at the event illustrates that the work we are doing at Cogent Computing remains at the cutting edge of wireless sensor technology. Events like Nanotech 2008 enables the Centre to share its work with colleagues over the world and hopefully make new contacts with a view to collaborating on projects in the future."
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer immense potential for performing detailed spatio-temporal, multi-parameter measurements in a variety of applications. When coupled with actuation, this technology could become even more powerful.
Dr. Elena Gaura, Reader in Pervasive Computing and Director of Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre at Coventry University, successfully organised and delivered a one-day tutorial on emerging network sensing and actuation technologies with a focus on the state of the art in WSN systems being designed and deployed. The tutorial run as part of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress which took place in Seoul, Korea from July 6 - 11, 2008.
The target group for the tutorial included control system designers, sensor technologists/designers/developers and application developers among others. The tutorial presentation is available here: IFAC tutorial 2008
More details on this event are available on the tutorial webpage.