Add to Calendar Monday, 19.07.2010, 14:30 to 15:30, Rheinsaal, B-IT (Dahlmannstraße 2)

Prof. Tracy Camp (Colorado School of Mines): "Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation, Progress, and Challenges"

Abstract:
Wireless sensor networks are improving our world in numerous ways, from
environmental monitoring to inventory tracking to health applications to
surveillance. These networks connect our physical world with our digital world,
and provide us with both a richer understanding of our environment and the
ability to more accurately control our surroundings. The capability for detailed
physical monitoring and adaptation offers tremendous opportunities for almost
every science and engineering field. There are, however, many technological
hurdles that we must solve in order to continue "instrumenting the world" with
wireless ad hoc sensor networks. For example, individual sensor devices are
incredibly resource constrained, including limited processing power, limited
storage capacity, limited communication bandwidth, and limited energy. Thus, new
hardware and software designs are needed to maximize the capabilities of a
wireless sensor network while minimizing the cost to deploy and maintain. In
this presentation, I will provide an overview of this emerging field of
research. I will describe the history of research in this area, the current
state-of-the-art, the diverse problems that researchers are presently tackling,
and the open research questions that continue to exist. These open research
questions require innovative solutions for several years to come. I will also
present the current research directions of my group in this area. For example,
in conjunction with geophysicists and environmental engineers, we are developing
wireless sensor networks to allow a geosystem to sense its environment and adapt
to improve performance. Lastly, I will discuss the challenges that exist in
setting up a wireless sensor network testbed.

Everybody is cordially invited to attend.   (How to get to B-IT)

Bio:
Tracy Camp is a Professor of computer science at the Colorado School of Mines.
She is the Founder and Director of the Toilers (http://toilers.mines.edu), an
active ad hoc networks research group currently consisting of three faculty
members, 11 graduate students, and six undergraduate students. Dr. Camp has
received 18 grants from the National Science Foundation, including a prestigious
CAREER award in 1997. This funding has produced (1) 12 software packages that
have been requested from (and shared with) more than 1400 researchers in 69
countries (as of December 2009) and (2) several research articles that have been
cited over 2,500 times (per Google Scholar, as of June 2008). Dr. Camp is an ACM
Distinguished Lecturer, an IEEE Senior Member, and an ACM Distinguished
Scientist. In 2006, Dr. Camp was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand. In December
2007, Dr. Camp received the Board of Trustees Outstanding Faculty Award at the
Colorado School of Mines, an award that has only been given five times between
1998-2007. Dr. Camp has served as the elected Treasurer of ACM's Special
Interest Group on Mobile Computing (SIGMOBILE). She is currently a member of the
editorial boards for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Computer
Communications, and Pervasive and Mobile Computing. Dr. Camp shares her life
with Max (born in 2000), Emma (born in 2003), her stay-at-home husband (Glen),
and four pets (three cats Scully/Sunset/Sparkle and a dog Jessie). All eight of
them are vegetarians who tremendously enjoy living in the foothills of the Rockies.