ZigBeef has developed a novel long-range radio frequency identification (RFID) system that allows handheld devices to track numerous mobile assets. The system consists of one or more asset tags and a tag reader and can be set up in minutes. The ZigBeef tags are about the size of a pack of chewing gum. The tag reader is presently offered as a USB-stick. PDA and Smartphone interfaces are also available. In minutes, users can set up a working RFID tagging system.

ZigBeef tag systems offer new levels of convenience for asset identification. For example, a rancher using a ZigBeef reader can receive an instantaneous headcount of cattle in a pasture. A rental lot manager can take inventory of tagged vehicles immediately. Oil well site managers can log entry and exit times of vehicles or equipment at their locations.

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Interesting video about the longest Sensor Networking chain, world record for the maximum number of hops.

The Computer Science department of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente (UT) is one of the largest academic institutions in computer science in the Netherlands, with 220 faculty members and 1200 students.

The Distributed and Embedded Systems (DIES) research group of EEMCS/CTIT collaborates with a number of academic and industrial partners in the ALwEN project. The scientific goals of the ALwEN project are to cope with design complexity of large-scale Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) systems; to create adaptive network management solutions; to understand and predict overall system level properties such as energy consumption, latency and throughput; to support the effective deployment of large WSN applications by minimizing the amount of effort spent to program and debug such applications; to address the security and privacy requirements that are related to Ambient Living and health care applications with WSN systems.

We are looking for a PostDoc (three years) who will investigate key management and secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks (vacancy number 08/016).

More info here.

Driven by emerging standards, increasing energy costs, and advances with Wireless Sensor Networking (WSN), the “smart home” is becoming a reality for the mass market. This extensive investigation with over 100 home installers, vendors, and suppliers found that the wireless smart home market is accelerating. Indicators of this growth include hundreds of products currently shipping and established service providers such as AT&T and SK Telecom are starting to offer WSN based home monitoring services.

While proprietary WSN systems have been used by professional installers in luxury homes for over a decade, wireless protocols such as Z-Wave and ZigBee will make smart home solutions affordable for the average household.

With a total potential market size of 6 billion cumulative WSN nodes worldwide, the residential sector is an essential target market for wireless sensing and control solutions. Some of the largest and fastest growing smart home markets include lighting, energy management, security, entertainment control, and home health. In 2012, the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) smart home market will be worth $2.8 billion worldwide, up from $470 million in 2007.

More info here.

EasySen, in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame’s MOSES Lab, proposes the use of radio frequency beacons to generate (switched) potential fields for navigation of large numbers of swarm agents. The idea is to use attractive beacons as waypoints and local attractors, while repelling beacons on each agent are used to control the density of agents and avoid collisions.

If a certain sequence of waypoints defines a navigation path, then the attractive beacons need to be distinguishable and need to be visited in a certain sequence. Repelling beacons are local and do not need to be distinguishable. Individual sensor swarm agents are equipped with a side-looking stereo receiver with opposite directions of highest sensitivity. A simple difference between the left and the right Receiver Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) allows to detect in which half space (relative to the center length axis of the vehicle) a beacon is located. One can then navigate towards a beacon by always moving towards the receiver side that has produced the stronger RSSI reading. For repelling beacons, one always moves towards the direction of the smaller RSSI signal.

The applications of this paradigm are many and range from environmental clean-up such as oil spill removal to surveillance and protection tasks.

Nice pictures of their current implementation, based on the mobile robots and Tmote Sky, can be seen here while a white paper can be found here. Also this video shows a ground vehicle swarm that performs a simple detection task.

Flavonoid is a little device that’s used to capture your physical movement and translate that into digital data. The simple link between physical activity (1st Life) and digital activity (2nd Life) is what Flavonoid provides.

Literally and practically — it is a device. It records physical movement using a three-axis accelerometer, sum-of-squares calculations. These calculations are time-stamped and churned through a simple algorithm to accumulate the readings over time, and record them at set intervals. The settings are easily modified through a terminal interface that allows you to see the data, adjust recording intervals and thresholds, calibrate the device, set the time and date, and a bunch of other diagnostic and configuration sorts of things. These are version 7.

More info here.

A postdoc position in wireless sensor networks (Ref 2008/87) and a position as research scientist in virtual machines and language tools for sensor networks (Ref 2008/86) are available at CSIRO in Australia.

For job info go here

For info on projects go here.

The Chester Carlson Prize was founded in 1985 in memory of Chester Carlson, the Swedish-American inventor of the copying machine and founder of the Xerox Corporation. The prize winner is selected by Xerox and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. The prize sum is 100,000 SEK (10,500 EUR).

This year the Chester Carlson Prize went to Adam Dunkels for his works on the micro-TCP/IP stack and the Contiki Operating System for embedded devices. It is nice to see that someone from the sensornets research community received this prestigious award this year. More details here.

Engineering student Brycen Spencer has designed a safety helmet that could help save the lives of thousands of outdoor sports enthusiasts involved in accidents each year. His Wireless Impact Guardian, or WIG, which signals for help even when the wearer is unconscious, is a giant leap forward in helmet safety.

“The WIG will be activated when it is buckled on,” says Spencer. “If you fall and hit your head, the helmet will detect that and beep for a minute or so. If you don’t turn it off, WIG sends for help, either directly to 911 or to a third-party service that relays the emergency call to 911. Included with the message will be a GPS location giving your geographical coordinates so the emergency team knows precisely where you are.”

More info here.

SENSEI is an Integrated Project in the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme, in the ICT Thematic Priority of Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures: ICT-2007.1.1: The Network of the Future.

In order to realise the vision of Ambient Intelligence in a future network and service environment, heterogeneous wireless sensor and actuator networks (WS&AN) have to be integrated into a common framework of global scale and made available to services and applications via universal service interfaces. SENSEI creates an open, business driven architecture that fundamentally addresses the scalability problems for a large number of globally distributed WS&A devices. It provides necessary
network and information management services to enable reliable and accurate context information retrieval and interaction with the physical environment. By adding mechanisms for accounting, security, privacy and trust it enables an open and secure market space for context-awareness and real world interaction.

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