Center for Embedded Network Sensing

Observing systems facilitate scientific studies by instrumenting the real world and collecting corresponding measurements, with the aim of detecting and tracking phenomena of interest. A wide range of critical environmental monitoring objectives in resource management, environmental protection, and public health all require distributed observing systems. The goal of such systems is to help scientists verify or falsify hypotheses with useful samples taken by the stationary and mobile units, as well as to analyze data autonomously to discover interesting trends or alarming conditions. In our project, we focus on a class of observing systems which are embedded into the environment, consist of stationary and mobile sensors, and react to collected observations by reconfiguring the system and adapting which observations are collected next. In this paper, we give an overview of our project in the context of a marine biology application.