The SensorPlanet project builds an open global mobile device centric research platform for wireless sensor network research, akin to somewhat analogous platform for backbone network services called PlanetLabs.

The distributed platform will provide the necessary infrastructure for world’s top research labs to perform innovative research on wireless sensor networks, where the mobile devices can be seen both as gateways to the mesh sensor networks and also as sensor nodes themselves.

This open innovation initiative will allow Nokia to collaborate with the best teams in the field around the world, and direct the academic Wireless Sensor Network research globally towards a mobile device centric innovation.

The project’s webpage is available here.

Finally what we all have been waiting for; the Call for Papers (CFP) of SenSys 2007 has been announced. SenSys’07 will be held in Sydney, Australia in November 2007 with Sanjay Jha (UNSW) as the General Chair, and Phillip Gibbons (Intel Research) and Akos Ledeczi (Vanderbilt Unv.) as Program Co-chairs. The initial CFP of SenSys’07 is available here

An interesting thing to notice about this year’s CFP is that SenSys is broadening it’s focus beyond mote-class sensor networks. For more information about SenSys, kindly see this wikipedia entry.

The Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre has uploaded some great video on WSN on YouTube. In detail:

The Dream and Reality of Wireless Sensor Networks : researchers from the Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre discuss current issues in wireless sensor networks. This video was first aired at IEEE ICIA2006.

Cloud of Points Surface Reconstruction : this animation shows how location information from a wireless sensor network can be used to construct a surface of the physical terrain, using self-organising maps.

Mars Exploration Scenario : an animated film describing the deployment of wireless sensor network technology to explore Mars.

Koreans are safer from dangerous weather conditions now that the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) has installed wireless mesh networks to monitor islands off the country’s southern coast. The mesh networks connect remote weather forecasting equipment and video cameras to the KMA’s network.

The mesh networks are a good solution for connecting outdoor weather sensors to the main network because they can be used over large areas of land and water, according to Korea Telecom, which installed them. Traditional network cabling would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to install in these outlying islands and coastal areas.

The complete story here.

International Workshop on WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS in conjunction with NOTERE 2007 (New Technologies of Distributed Systems Nouvelles TEchnologies de la Repartition) Marrakesh, Morocco, 4-8 June, 2007

Authors are invited to submit original contributions written in French or English in IEEE two-column formats using an electronic PDF or MS-Word formats. The paper length should not exceed 6 pages.

We would like to inform the interested persons that the submission deadline has ben extended to: JANUARY 12, 2007.

Submissions should be sent attached by email to the workshop chair at:
ahmed.khoumsi@usherbrooke.ca

For more information on the NOTERE’2007 and the Workshops please consult the web site:
www.notere-conf.org.

The Eco-Sensor Network is located at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

Researchers from the National Centre for Sensor Research have developed mini-weather stations to keep an eye on conditions inside the Great Palm House, the Cactus House and the Orchid House at the Botanic Gardens. Each of the tiny “mote” sensor-boards has sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, light levels, atmospheric pressure and oxygen levels in the air.

The network of sensors sends real-time environmental data to the interactive website, eco-sensor web. You can take a look at this data on the graphing page.

The project homepage is here.

The Harvard University Sensor Networks Laboratory has made a public release of a TinyOS-based platform for monitoring seismic and acoustic signals. This system was designed initially for geophysical monitoring at active volcanoes, but can be readily adapted to other applications, including civil structures monitoring, CBM, etc.

This release includes both hardware and software as fielded at our deployment at Reventador Volcano in August 2005. We are also making a public release of the seismoacoustic data set acquired by the network over the 19-day, 16-node deployment, which consists of over 500 MBytes of raw data Code, hardware specs, papers, talks, etc. can be found here: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/volcano.

The Sensors lab at University of Massachusetts, Amherst has made a public release of Capsule, which is a rich object-based storage system for sensors that supports flexible use of available flash memory by sensor applications.

Capsule project web-page is here:

http://sensors.cs.umass.edu/projects/capsule/.

52°North is an open initiative that advances the development of cutting edge open source geospatial software. The initial focii of the open source technology development are Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) , Web Security and Digital Rights Management (DRM) . Other streams of work will open up according to community direction.

They host a collection of Java based web services implementations. Their products are published solely under the GNU General Public License (GPL) , but are also available – via a dual licensing model – to commercial users.

As an example, the 52N Sensor Observation Service enables interoperable, web-based access to sensors and real-time geosensor data. This product implements the current OGC Sensor Observation Service draft specification to access sensor information (SensorML) and sensor observations (O&M).
The 52N SOS allows specificatzion-conform provision of georeferenced measurement data. As a result, it is easily integrated in geodata-infrastructures and geoservice-infrastructures. In situ sensors (e.g. water gages), as well as remote sensing sensors can be used for data collection.

The project homepage is available here.

Advances in sensor technology and distributed computing, coupled with the development of open standards that facilitate sensor/sensor network interoperability, are contributing to the emergence of a phenomenon known as the ‘Sensor Web’. This phenomenon can be described as an advanced Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in which different sensors and sensor networks are combined to create a sensor-rich feedback control paradigm.

Featuring an advanced and scalable architecture that supports numerous diverse and heterogeneous sensor types, a Sensor Web includes a range of sensors such as flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, Webcams and satellite-borne Earth imaging devices.

A number of organisations are doing their own sensor web research. A collaborative research platform called the Sensor Web Alliance (SWA) has been founded. The aim is to pool resources in the SWA, coordinate research and allow participating organisations to share IP, which will spread risk and lower the cost of entry.

The Sensor Web Alliance webpage is here.