From 7.5th floor:

This week’s LBS360.net podcast “You are a Sensor” discusses volunteer geographic information and “taking advantage of people doing what they do” to detect diseases, natural disasters, traffic jams, and zones of social activities.

Researchers have determined that you, even without a portable device can be an effective geographic sensor. This week we explore examples of how individuals, sometimes along with their electronic gadgets, can act as effective sensors for disease or natural disaster. Our editors share some proven techniques and explore how this type of data collection might play out in the future.

NSDR 2008 program is now online. You can read papers (PDF) and leave comments as well. This year Kenneth Kenniston (MIT) is the keynote speaker.

The 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR) will be held with SIGCOMM 2008 on 18th August in Seattle, WA. Early registration is now open. Looking forward to your participation.

Check out the program here.

Today is the last day to register to senZations’08, Third International Summer School on Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and Wireless Sensing in the Future Internet.

More info here.

SAN FRANCISCO — The secret to finding the perfect parking spot in congested cities is usually just a matter of luck. But drivers here will get some help from an innocuous tab of plastic that will soon be glued to the streets.

This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment.

For more information click here

The Contiki project is happy to announce the release of version 2.2 of the Contiki operating system! Contiki 2.2 brings a set of new features: the shell has been much improved and now supports network-level commands, low-power radio networking, sensor data collection, and power profiling; Coffee, a new flash ROM-based file system; contiki-collect: a program for collecting and displaying sensor data from the network; a network time synchronization mechanism; the Chameleon architecture that separates protocol headers from protocol logic; the LPP experimental power-saving MAC protocol.

More details here.

The Tenet project has made a public release of the Tenet software v2.0. Tenet is software for flexibly programming a tiered network of sensors. Tiered networks consist of motes and masters (PC-class devices, such as Stargate, that run Linux or Cygwin). In Tenet, all applications run on the masters which task the motes using a simple but expressive linear data-flow tasking language. Tenet 2.0 introduces several new platforms/protocols/features and has been used in seismic and habitat monitoring deployments for up to a month.

For more information, click here

Sow monitoring is a very interesting application area for sensor networks. Consider sows wearing sensor nodes incorporating movement detectors as well as a micro-controller and a radio. A farmer could have wireless contact with the sensor nodes and thus track the sows roaming freely in their assigned pen. Software running on the sensor nodes could also alert the farmer in case a sow is entering its heat period (there is a correlation between the movement of the sows and its heat period). Today, sows wear tags but farmers need physical contacts with those tags to identify the animal; in addition, farmers are on their own to monitor heat. The Danish Committee for Pig Production has recognized the potential of sensor networks for sow monitoring.

More info here.

Those annoying and often ignored car alarms could be a thing of the past if researchers developing an anti-theft sensor network have their way.

According to scientists at Penn State, the anti-theft car network would require a sensor (or multiple tiny slave sensors) in each auto that would then register it to a local master sensor. In a parking lot the cars would form a great big secure network.

Right now the sensors we are testing are about the size of a dollar coin according to Sencun Zhu, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Penn State. “We will eventually make them only about a cubic millimeter, small enough to embed in a parking sticker and very inexpensive to manufacture.” A cubic millimeter is about the size of an ice cream sprinkle, researchers noted.

More info here.

Joe Polastre (Sentilla CTO) have been running around the world over the last few weeks, with two trips to Europe and some other trips around the US. He gave a number of invited talks, have spent time talking with visionaries and leaders like John Gage, and have constantly been revising the presentation to address all of the great questions that I’ve received. The presentation’s focus on the impact pervasive computing will have on our society, how Sentilla’s platform is leading this next generation of computing, what’s in the platform, and how did Sentilla make it all fit inside a tiny embedded computer that has never been done before. He have also had a number of interactions with people working on some very cool projects — including projects that I’m allowed to talk about publicly (those are always the most fun for me).

More info here.

“PUMPING” data around a wireless network of sensors - just as blood is pumped around the human circulatory system - could allow the sensors’ batteries to last four times as long.

Sensor networks like the ones used for environmental monitoring are usually “tree-like”. Their branching structure means information gets from A to B quickly, but means devices have to be turned on permanently to co-ordinate the data traffic.

More info here.