The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from various fields to discuss trends in pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation and their impact on the day-to-day application of geography by consumers and geo-friendly industries such as tourism and education.

held in conjunction with the Fourth IEEE International Conference on
Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks, and Information Processing (ISSNIP
2008),

http://www.elec.uow.edu.au/issnip2008/

December 15-18, Sydney, Australia

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OVERVIEW

Environmental monitoring is a very important application area for sensor networks as it allows near real-time monitoring to be carried out at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Present day monitoring technologies do not provide such advantages. While a significant amount of research has been done on the theoretical aspects of sensor networks, literature on experiences with actual deployments of sensor networks for different types of environmental monitoring applications is highly limited. This symposium focuses on the use of sensor networking technologies for environmental monitoring. It provides an ideal platform to discuss various aspects of experiences with real-life sensor network deployments and also new and novel techniques designed specifically for gathering data in environmental monitoring applications.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST

We seek papers describing original, previously unpublished results. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Experiences with real-life deployments of sensor networks, e.g. environmental effects on reliable communication/data collection, etc.
• Experiences with power generation techniques, e.g. energy-scavenging.
• Hybrid architectures, e.g. integrating wired and wireless sensor networks.
• Distributed data management and visualization techniques for streaming sensor data.
• Real-life performance of in-network algorithms for reliable data acquisition, e.g. self-calibration, data aggregation, event detection, etc.
• Sensor-actor coordination, e.g. data muling.
• Commercial applications and market studies, e.g. precision agriculture, coral reefs, lakes, space, etc.

Why do I blog this? Of potential interest for next year...

A report from our Berlin correspondent on design and society.

The more you love design, the more you enjoy seeing things a bit worn, battered and imperfect. The greater your obsession with seating, for example, the more you’ll notice it — chairs out there in the world, a bit tattered and torn, weird one-offs, big green sofas shaped like mountain ranges, piano stools without pianos, junked stools salvaged from the trash and painted pink.

Velib is a community bicycle rental service in Paris (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Bicing in Barcelona). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city.

[...] As follow-up to the work on Bicing in Barcelona, Mathieu Arnold granted us access to  the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over several weeks. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. One intention behind these visualisation is to explore how accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes the different neighborhoods at certain hours). In addition we aim at revealing Paris, the life of its different neighborhoods, specific areas, their topologies and dynamics through its bike system.

Images from The animation of these spatio-temporal data that reveals the pulse of the Velib' system over a full day (February 10, 2008) based on the number of bikes available at each station. see full video

Why do I blog this?

I find Fabien's work fascination and very relevant to what has been on my head for some time now. It is a great example of making sense of space in action. It makes me think of Lynch's notion of "imageability". Also of Dan Hill's ideas on urban computing and services and Kazys Varnelis' recent article on "The invisible city" highlighting the increasing reliance on maps to understand our new reality and the opportunities for designers in developing this new language.

Can twitter be killer app for the internet of things? Apparently not but it hasn't failed to capture the imagination of many: TwitArcs, TweetWheel, Twitter Statistics, Twitter Spectrum, Twitter Topic Stream, Twitter Social Network Analysis

What makes twitter a good candidate for these applications? is it the easy to use posting interface? is it the simplicity of access? the community? Probably a combination of all those...

Pachube will become interesting the more people it gets to use it. If you are working with networked devices that are sharing data over the internet, chances are you are already familiar with the technologies necessary to accomplish this. Probably you even rather do it yourself using your language/platform of choice. However the attractive to both data providers and consumers is belonging to a large distributed community of artefacts and spaces that adds context to your data.

Duncan got a feed from Arup's BMS running pretty quickly.

I have posted the workshop materials I used to talk about the ZigBee side of things. Also this weekend I am making available the first public release of Bricks, after two years in the making. More on that soon.