IBM and the Beacon Institute, a nonprofit scientific-research organization in Beacon, NY, have announced a collaboration with several other research institutions to create an environmental-monitoring system for New York’s Hudson River. Their plan is to turn all 315 miles of the river into a distributed network of sensors that will collect biological, physical, and chemical information and transmit it to a central location, where it will be analyzed by IBM’s new data acquisition and analysis system.

The network’s sensors will be deployed in a variety of ways. Some will be mounted on a new robotic underwater vehicle developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, both collaborators on the project; the vehicle will be powered by solar cells and can operate either autonomously or under human remote control. Other sensors will be suspended from buoys or fixed in place along the riverbed.

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The ICT Centre in Australia is looking for Wireless Sensor Network researchers. The Centre has over 240 researchers across Australia working on a wide range of ICT technologies and application areas. The open positions in sensor networks include:
- Senior Research Scientist
- Research Scientist
- 2 Postdoctoral Fellowships
- Embedded Software Engineer
Applications close on 21 September 2007. See this flyer for details.

Chinese scientists are planning to install a wireless sensor network in the South Pole that will enable them to monitor changes in Antarctic glacier with a click of mouse from Beijing, polar researchers said on Thursday.

The network is expected be installed during China’s 24th Antarctic expedition scheduled for October, a remote sensing specialist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cheng Xiao, said.

Cheng and 16 other potential Antarctic explorers are currently receiving a two-week field training programme in Tibet that will equip them with survival skills on high altitudes.

More info here.