Abstract

Advances in microsensor technology as well as the development of miniaturized computing platforms enable us to scatter numerous untethered sensing devices in hard to reach terrains, and continuously collect geospatial information in never before seen spatial and temporal scales. Sensor networks deployed in geographic space to detect, monitor and track environmental phenomena are called geosensor networks. Geosensor network technologies are revolutionizing the way that geospatial information is collected, analyzed and integrated with existing large-scale sensor platforms and historical data, with the geospatial content of the information being of fundamental importance. Analysis and event detection in a geosensor network is performed in real-time within the network.

In this talk, I will present some of our current research work in the Geosensor Networks Lab at the University of Maine with regard to monitoring and tracking continuous phenomena using geosensor networks as well as in-network spatial window query estimation. Another one of our application areas is intelligent transportation and ad-hoc decision making in dynamic mobile geosensor networks as well as ocean drifter networks for red tide detection.

Bio: Dr. Silvia Nittel’s is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spatial Information Science & Engineering and a faculty member with the National Center of Geographic Information & Analysis at the University of Maine. She received her Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Zurich in database management systems, and joined the UCLA Computer Science Department as postdoctoral researcher in 1995. At UCLA , she worked on high-performance integration platforms for scientific data mining application for climate change. From 1998 to 2001, she was the Co-Director of the UCLA Data Mining Lab. In Fall 2001, she started as Assistant Professor at the University of Maine.

Her current research interests are in extending database technology to support stationary and mobile sensor networks, especially geosensor networks. In detail, her research focus is on in-network data aggregation for quantitative and qualitative spatial queries in geosensor networks, as well as real-time querying of continuous sensor data streams stemming from various sized sensor devices creating sensor data of different spatio-temporal scale. She is the co-founder of the conference series “Geosensor Networks”, and author of two books on Geosensor Networks. She is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Early CAREER award, and her research has been funded with grants from NSF , NGA and NASA .