Thank you to the following supporters of ICASSP 2007
Shankar Sastry, University of California, Berkeley
There has been a great deal of excitement in recent years concerning the evolution of sensor webs of smart dust. There has been a very substantive active world wide in this area and in particular at Berkeley there have now been over six generation of “motes” for these sensor webs, and numerous start ups have arisen to commercialize these developments. I will survey the state of these exciting technology developments and describe how the technology push is matched by the applications pull on numerous different kinds of deployments. I will highlight the efforts of my group and that of my colleagues in developing what we refer to as "embedded intelligence" in the environment. In particular, I will describe the range of learning, signal processing and data aggregation methods and algorithms needed to track multiple targets in sensor webs and to be able to pursue these targets in a pursuit evasion game. I believe that the next frontier is the development of network embedded systems combining the use of sensor networks combining heterogeneous webs with high and low bandwidth sensors (such as camera motes) and mobile sensor webs. In particular, I will discuss the use of some new techniques, we have introduced in the context of computer vision, called Generalized Principal Component Analysis to analyze multi-camera data. Another major new direction goes beyond simply sensing and monitoring the physical environment to combine action with the perceptual capabilities of sensor webs. I will give some new results towards applications of closing the loop around network embedded sensors. We believe that this closing the loop brings into sharp focus the real time constraints and issues inherent in the use of networked embedded systems. A key application in this regard is the use of wireless sensor webs to instrument physical infrastructures, such as electric power, water, gas, etc. Since such network embedded systems are vulnerable to information attack, the securing sensor webs from attack is critical to infrastructure protection. I will give a taxonomy of attacks on network embedded systems and some defense strategies.
S. Shankar Sastry is currently the Director of CITRIS (Center
for Information Technology in the Interests of Society) an interdisciplinary
center spanning UC Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz. He served as
Chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences,
University of California, Berkeley from January, 2001 through June 2004. From
1999-early 2001, he served as Director of the Information Technology Office at
DARPA. From 1996-1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research
Laboratory at Berkeley, conducting research in electrical, computer sciences
and engineering.