2nd Annual Research Review Posters

Click # for abstract below	Title of Poster/Demonstration** Download PDF or PPT file of Poster	Authors	Technology/Application
1	Networked Infomechanical Systems (NIMS)	Roja Bandari, Jamie Burke, Victor Chen, Willie Chen, Wendy Gwo, Eric Lin, Kris Porter, Rachel Scollans, Michael Stealey, Lynn Wang, Eric Yuen, Robert Gilbert, Jason Gordon, Aman Kansal, Xiangming Kong, Steve Liu, Chris Lucas, Richard Pon, Mohammad Rahimi, Nithya Ramanathan, Lisa Shirachi, Arun Somasundara, Jeffrey Tseng, Ashutosh Verma, Winston Wu, Yan Yu, Richard Ambrose, Deborah Estrin, Michael Hamilton, Tom Harmon, Jenny Jay, William Kaiser, Gregory Pottie, Mani Srivastava, Gauarav Sukhatme and John Villasenor	NIMS
2	Reliable Actuation for Networked Infomechanical Systems	Roja Bandari, Wendy Gwo, Rachel Scollans, Richard Pon and William Kaiser	NIMS
3	Task Allocation for Event-Aware Spatiotemporal Sampling of Environmental Variables	Maxim Batalin, Gaurav Sukhatme, William Kaiser, Yan Yu, Richard Pon, Jason Gordon, M. H. Rahimi, Gregory J. Pottie and Deborah Estrin
4	Using Hierarchical Location Names for Scalable Routing and Rendezvous in Wireless Sensor Networks	Fang Bian, Ramesh Govindan, Scott Shenker
5	Fast Visual Feature Selection and Tracking in a Hybrid Reconfigurable Architecture	Alessandro Bissacco, Jason Meltzer, Soheil Ghiasi and Stefano Soatto
6	Statistical Model of Lossy Links in Wireless Sensor Networks	Alberto Cerpa, Jennifer Wong, Louane Kuang, Miodrag Potkonjak and Deborah Estrin
7	Women@ CENS: A Research System	June Chang, Jennifer Johnson, Karen Kim, Principal Investigator: Deborah Estrin, Co-Principal Investigators: Linda Sax and Christine Borgman
8	System Identification of Structures in the Laboratory and in the Field	M. Contreras, G. Farrar, S. Taylor Lange, D. Skolnik, E. Yu, Y. Lei, J. Wallace
9	Bacterial Navigation and Applications to Sensing in Marine Environments	Amit Dhariwal, Gaurav Sukhatme, Aristides A.G. Requicha, David Caron, Carl Oberg and Eric Shieh	Marine Microorganisms
10	Real Action Gaming Robots	Jonathan Friedman, David Lee, Parixit Aghera, Advait Dixit, Aman Kansal, Deborah Estrin, William Kaiser, Mani Srivastava and Gaurav Sukhatme
11	Rate-adaptive, efficient, long-term time-synchronization in sensor networks	Saurabh Ganeriwal, Deepak Ganesan, Mani B. Srivastava, Mark Hansen and Deborah Estrin
12	Reputation-Based Frameworks for High Integrity Sensor Networks	Saurabh Ganeriwal and Mani B. Srivastava
13	Water Quality Sensing and Sampling	Robert Gilbert, Richard F. Ambrose, William J. Kaiser
14	EmTOS: A Development Tool for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks	Lewis Girod, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, Eric Osterweil, Tom Schoellhammer, R. Kapur and Deborah Estrin
15	Retransmission, Blacklisting and Routing Metrics in Sensor Network Routing	Omprakash Gnawali, Mark Yarvis, John Heidemann and Ramesh Govindan
16	Gait Analysis	Caitlin Gomez, Cirel Menor, Kiran Sahni, Winston Wu and William Kaiser
17	Multisensor Module for Networked Infomechanical Systems	Jason Gordon, Kris Porter, Lisa Shirachi, Rachel Scollans, Victor Chen, William Kaiser	NIMS
18	A Sensor Network Application Construction Kit	Ben Greenstein, Eddie Kohler and Deborah Estrin
19	Reconfigurable Sensor Networks with SOS	Chih-Chieh Han, RamKumar Rengaswamy and Roy Shea
20	Ion Liquid Chromatography On-a-Chip for Multiple Ion Sensing	Qing He, Carl Chin and Yu-Chong Tai
21	Energy Harvesting Support for Sensor Networking	Jason Hsu, Aman Kansal and Mani Srivastava
22	Actuation Methods for Enhanced Coverage	Authors: Aman Kansal, William Kaiser, Greg Pottie and Mani Srivastava
23	Micromachined Amperometric Nitrate Sensor	Dohyun Kim, Ira Goldberg and Jack Judy
24	Networked Sensing of Nitrate in Support of Groundwater Quality Protection	Juyoul Kim, Jose Saez, Naim Busek, Yeonjeong Park, J. Eric Haux, Deborah Estrin and Thomas Harmon

1
Title: Networked Infomechanical Systems (NIMS)
Authors: Roja Bandari, Jamie Burke, Victor Chen, Willie Chen, Wendy Gwo, Eric Lin, Kris Porter, Rachel Scollans, Michael Stealey, Lynn Wang, Eric Yuen, Robert Gilbert, Jason Gordon, Aman Kansal, Xiangming Kong, Steve Liu, Chris Lucas, Richard Pon, Mohammad Rahimi, Nithya Ramanathan, Lisa Shirachi, Arun Somasundara, Jeffrey Tseng, Ashutosh Verma, Winston Wu, Yan Yu, Richard Ambrose, Deborah Estrin, Michael Hamilton, Tom Harmon, Jenny Jay, William Kaiser, Gregory Pottie, Mani Srivastava, Gauarav Sukhatme and John Villasenor

Sensor networks have emerged from research on low power, networked, and embedded systems and are now being applied to important scientific issues. Networked Infomechanical Systems, or NIMS, has been developed to exploit infrastructure assisted mobility. With the ability to move and precise knowledge of its own location, NIMS nodes will be able to tackle new areas such as sensing uncertainty, event aware fidelity driven sampling, and active fusion. A brief introduction to each of these fields will be presented. Also included will be a description of the second generation NIMS prototype node currently deployed at the James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve in Idyllwild California and some of the current field biology experiments being undertaken with this technology

2
Title: Reliable Actuation for Networked Infomechanical Systems
Author: Roja Bandari, Wendy Gwo, Rachel Scollans, Richard Pon and William Kaiser

This poster explains Networked Infomechanical Systems (NIMS) and its applications. In addition, it details the problem of getting accurate location data for the NIMS node and the proposed solution using a separate encoder module.

3
Title: Task Allocation for Event-Aware Spatiotemporal Sampling of Environmental Variables
Authors: Maxim Batalin, Gaurav Sukhatme, William Kaiser, Yan Yu, Richard Pon, Jason Gordon, M. H. Rahimi, Gregory J. Pottie and Deborah Estrin

Monitoring of environmental phenomena with embedded networked sensing confronts the challenges of both unpredictable variability in the spatial distribution of phenomena, coupled with demands for a high spatial sampling rate in three dimensions. For example, low distortion mapping of critical solar radiation properties in forest environments may require two-dimensional spatial sampling rates of greater than 10 samples=m2 over transects exceeding 1000 m2. Clearly, adequate sampling coverage of such a transect requires an impractically large number of sensing nodes. A new approach, Networked Infomechanical System (NIMS), has been introduced to combine autonomous-articulated and static sensor nodes enabling sufficient spatiotemporal sampling density over large transects to meet a general set of environmental mapping demands.

4
Title: Using Hierarchical Location Names for Scalable Routing and Rendezvous in Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Fang Bian, Ramesh Govindan, Scott Shenker

Until practical ad-hoc localization systems are developed, early deployments of wireless sensor networks will manually configure location information in network nodes in order to assign spatial context to sensor readings. In this paper, we argue that such deployments will use hierarchical location names (for example, a node in a habitat monitoring network might be said to be node number N in cluster C of region R), rather than positions in a two- or three-dimensional coordinate system. We show that these hierarchical location names can be used to design a scalable routing system called HLR. HLR provides a variety of primitives including unicast, scoped anycast and broadcast, as well as various forms of scalable rendezvous. These primitives can be used to implement most data-centric routing and storage schemes proposed in the literature; these schemes currently need precise position information and geographic routing in order to scale well. We evaluate HLR using simulations as well as an implementation on the Mica-2 motes.

5
Title: Fast Visual Feature Selection and Tracking in a Hybrid Reconfigurable Architecture
Authors: Alessandro Bissacco, Jason Meltzer, Soheil Ghiasi and Stefano Soatto

We present a fast visual feature tracking system which takes advantage of dedicated hardware to perform the computationally intensive step of selection. A software system uses the output of the hardware selector to develop tracks using filtering and data association techniques, and image-based validation. By using separate, custom hardware to select hundreds of points per frame then associating these points to tracks in software, we achieve greater than 60Hz real-time tracking.

6
Title: Statistical Model of Lossy Links in Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Alberto Cerpa, Jennifer Wong, Louane Kuang, Miodrag Potkonjak and Deborah Estrin

Recently, several landmark wireless sensor network deployment studies clearly demonstrated a great discrepancy between experimentally observed communication properties and properties produced by widely used simulation models. Our first goal is to provide sound foundations for conclusions drawn from these studies by extracting the relationship between pairs of location (e.g distance) and communication properties (e.g. reception rate) using non-parametric statistical techniques and by calculating intervals of confidence for all claims. Furthermore, we study not only individual links properties, but also their correlation with respect to common transmitters and receivers and their geometrical location. The second and main objective is to develop a series of wireless network generators which produce networks of an arbitrary size and under arbitrary deployment rules with realistic communication properties. For this task we use a generalized rejection algorithm and an iterative improvement-based optimization procedure to generate instances of the network that are statistically similar to empirically observed networks. We evaluate the accuracy our conclusions using the proposed model on a set of standard communication tasks, such as connectivity maintenance and routing.

7
Title: Women@ CENS: A Research System
Authors: June Chang, Jennifer Johnson, Karen Kim, Principal Investigator: Deborah Estrin, Co-Principal Investigators: Linda Sax and Christine Borgman

Although we have seen progress over the last few decades, women still lag far behind their male counterparts, especially at the doctoral level, in the fields of engineering and computer science. In an attempt to counteract women’s persistent under-representation, pre-college and college experiences have been the focus of both intervention and research endeavors. Despite such efforts, there is one crucial educational component of a woman’s undergraduate experience that remains somewhat of a mystery: the undergraduate research experience. The goals of the project are to:

Identify best practices and strategies inherent in successful undergraduate research programs
Develop a demonstration model of an undergraduate research program that can be shared
Promote women’s long-term commitment to science and engineering.

8
Title: System Identification of Structures in the Laboratory and in the Field
Authors: M. Contreras, G. Farrar, S. Taylor Lange, D. Skolnik, E. Yu, Y. Lei, J. Wallace

System identification of a scale structure in the laboratory preceded full scale studies of the Four Seasons office building (Sherman Oaks, CA) under forced vibrations and the Louis Factor building (UCLA) under earthquake and ambient vibrations. An advanced system identification algorithm, N4SID (numerical subspace state space system identification), is employed. The spurious modes generated due to sensor noise and measured errors are distinguished from the physical ones and disregarded through the use of “stability diagrams”. A finite element computer program is used to analyze each structure studied and analytical results are compared to experimental results.

9
Title: Bacterial Navigation and Applications to Sensing in Marine Environments.
Authors: Amit Dhariwal, Gaurav Sukhatme, Aristides A.G. Requicha, David Caron, Carl Oberg and Eric Shieh

A variety of naturally-occurring and introduced microorganisms adversely impact marine ecosystems. They can affect human health, fisheries and even tourism. However, conditions under which aquatic microorganisms develop are not well understood, and methods for detecting microorganisms are too slow and complex for timely intervention. With the development of technology, sensor networks provide a method to monitor the microorganisms in real time and solve the problem. The ability to autonomously detect, locate and track such phenomena (the source of the induced gradient) would give scientists a tool to monitor and study ecosystems at an unprecedented level of detail. We are in particular motivated by the research goal to track the brown-tide algal blooms in nature and follow their migration over time. We plan to locate these algae and measure their concentrations using a chlorophyll sensor. Additional features which govern their abundance and survival in an area include temperature, nutrient concentrations etc. which we would monitor over time. We are interested in the development of simple, robust, energy efficient and cost-effective techniques which could be used in-situ to locate source phenomena of interest to scientists. We propose a simple strategy for a mobile robot (or multiple robots) to navigate to such a source using gradient information and extremely rudimentary actuation. Our strategy is inspired by the studies of taxis in bacteria.

10
Title: Real Action Gaming Robots

Authors: Jonathan Friedman, David Lee, Parixit Aghera, Advait Dixit, Aman Kansal, Deborah Estrin, William Kaiser, Mani Srivastava and Gaurav Sukhatme

We present a new robotic architecture for research in mobile sensor networks and new interactive gaming environments. The RagoWorld consists of a fully capable, modular mobile platform and an interactive gaming environment, replete with a diverse array of navigational hazards, sensing obstacles, and detectable objects. Currently, Ragobot, the robotic platform, is capable of traversing complex terrains, avoiding moderately sized objects, and reading and writing RFID tags. The next generation of Ragobots will support multiple different sensor node architectures and have more sensing modalities, such as inertial navigation and acoustic tracking.

11
Title: Rate-adaptive, efficient, long-term time-synchronization in sensor networks
Authors: Saurabh Ganeriwal, Deepak Ganesan, Mani B. Srivastava, Mark Hansen and Deborah Estrin

Current approaches for time synchronization concentrate on establishing pair-wise timing relationships between nodes at a given instant of time. However, once synchronized, nodes will typically go out of synchronization within a few minutes. Current techniques propose periodic re-synchronization involving many tens of packets every few minutes. Since time-synchronization is a critical service for most sensing applications, the energy consumption of such a scheme severely impacts network lifetime. In this paper, we measure, evaluate and analyze in-depth the long-term behavior of synchronization skew and drift on typical Mica sensor nodes and develop efficient long-term time synchronization protocols. Our objective is to develop online adaptive time-synchronization algorithms that can be customized by the user to either achieve minimum energy consumption or minimum synchronization error. In order to develop our protocol, we use a real time data set gathered over a time period of 36 hours to study the interplay between three key parameters that influence long-term synchronization - synchronization rate, history of past synchronization beacons and the prediction scheme.

12
Title: Reputation-Based Frameworks for High Integrity Sensor Networks
Authors: Saurabh Ganeriwal and Mani B. Srivastava

The traditional approach of providing network security has been to borrow tools from cryptography and authentication. However, we argue that the conventional view of security based on cryptography alone is not sufficient for the unique characteristics and novel misbehaviors encountered in sensor networks. Fundamental to this is the observation that cryptography cannot prevent malicious or non-malicious insertion of data from internal adversaries or faulty nodes. We believe that in general tools from different domains such as economics, statistics and data analysis will have to be combined with cryptography for the development of trustworthy sensor networks. Following this approach, we propose a reputation-based framework for sensor networks where nodes maintain reputation for other nodes and use it to evaluate their trustworthiness. The framework is modularized; we will analyze each building block in detail in this paper. We will show that this framework provides a scalable, diverse and a generalized approach for countering all types of misbehavior resulting from malicious and faulty nodes.

13
Title: Water Quality Sensing and Sampling
Authors: Robert Gilbert, Richard F. Ambrose, William J. Kaiser

Algal blooms and other negative stream conditions result from dynamic, interrelated factors. Understanding complex biotic and abiotic interactions often require multi-scale, high-resolution measurements. Stream conditions can change rapidly. Conventional low-resolution field sampling may miss important system dynamics. Using the NIMS node technology, we will be able to extract much higher resolution stream data. The nodes will be able to sense and sample a variety of water quality parameters, both abiotic and biotic. The node technology will enable better understanding of the process with which anthropogenic inputs flow through watersheds and change stream ecology. Greater familiarity of these processes will enable better management techniques.

14
Title: EmTOS: A Development Tool for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks
Authors: Lewis Girod, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, Eric Osterweil, Tom Schoellhammer, R. Kapur and Deborah Estrin

Recently deployed Wireless Sensor Network systems (WSNs) are increasingly following {\em heterogeneous} designs, incorporating a mixture of elements with widely varying capabilities. The development and deployment of WSNs rides heavily on the availability of simulation, emulation, visualization and analysis support. In this work, we develop tools specifically to support {\em heterogeneous} systems, as well as to support the measurement and visualization of {\em operational} systems that is critical to addressing the inevitable problems that crop up in deployment. Our system differs from related systems in three key ways: in its ability to simulate and emulate {\em heterogeneous} systems in their entirety, in its extensive support for integration and interoperability between motes and microservers, and in its unified set of tools that capture, view, and analyze real time debugging information from simulations, emulations, and deployments.

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