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TUTORIAL I
System Support for Sensor based Applications
Rajesh K. Gupta
University of California, San Diego
Sharad Mehrotra and Nalini Venkatasubramanian
University of California, Irvine

Audience: Researchers, students and practicing engineers who are interested exploring design issues specific to networked sensor systems. Minimal familiarity with operating systems, communications basics and database technology is assumed.

Course Description: With the advances in computational, communication, and sensing capabilities, large scale sensor-based distributed environments are becoming a reality. Sensor enriched communication and information infrastructures have the potential to revolutionize almost every aspect of human life benefiting application domains such as transportation, medicine, surveillance, security, defense, science and engineering. In the future, we will see a wide range of application domains that use embedded sensor networks for monitoring, analysis, control- e.g. monitoring chemical toxin levels, traffic monitoring and congestion analysis and embedded process control in manufacturing.

Such a distributed infrastructure must integrate networking, embedded systems, distributed computing and data management technologies to ensure seamless access to data dispersed across a hierarchy of storage, communication, and processing units -- from sensor devices where data originates to large databases where the data generated is stored and/or analyzed. Existing state of the art solutions that simply collect and gather information from distributed (power-constrained) sensors using wireless (bandwidth-constrained) networks into a repository suffer from scalability, timeliness and information fidelity problems. To make sensor environments energy/resource efficient while satisfying applications requirements, there is a need to exploit strategies at each level of the system – OS, runtime, distributed middleware and data management technologies must be integrated into an end-to-end solution.

The goal of this tutorial is to present challenges and efforts in exploiting sensor properties and savings at the various layers and develop comprehensive systems support for designing an end-to-end solution.The tutorial will address OS, middleware and data management challenges approaches that have a direct impact on the utility and efficiency of distributed sensor networks. Specifically, we will present a coordinated set of strategies consisting of: techniques for data management (clustering, automatic approximation, summarization) and techniques for resource management and control (automatic precision scaling, energy/power management, real-time and fault-tolerant data collection) that enables highly efficient movement and processing of information in distributed sensor networks.

Lecturer:Rajesh Gupta (Ph. D. Stanford) is a professor of Information and Computer Science at UC San Diego. His research interests are in system-level design for embedded and portable systems. He has authored or co-authored over 100 articles on various aspects of microelectronic design/CAD. Gupta is a recipient of the UCI Chancellor's Award for excellence in undergraduate research, a National Science Foundation Career Award, two Departmental Achievement Awards and a Components Research Team Award at Intel. Gupta serves as editor-in-chief of IEEE Design and Test and on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on CAD and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the ACM/SIGDA and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for 2000-2001.

Sharad Mehrotra (Ph.D. UT Austin) is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine. He specializes in the areas of database management and distributed systems and is leading the QUASAR project that explores data management in highly dynamic sensor environments. Prof. Mehrotra is an author of over 100 research publications in top conferences and journals in various areas related to data management. He is the recipient of the NSF Career Award, Bill Gear Outstanding junior faculty research award at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, and the prestigious ACM SIGMOD best paper award in 2001.

Nalini Venkatasubramanian (Ph.D. UIUC) is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include distributed systems, middleware, real-time multimedia and formal reasoning methodologies for developing safe and flexible middleware technology for highly dynamic environments. Nalini was a member of technical staff at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California for several years where she worked on large scale distributed systems and interactive multimedia applications. She has also worked on various database management systems and on programming languages/compilers for high performance machines. Nalini has over 60 publications in various aspects of distributed systems middleware. She is a recipient of the NSF Career Award and a Teaching Excellence Award from the University of California, Irvine.