Panel Discussion presentation: Astroinformatics: Linking Scientific Data and Publications

Alberto Pepe, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He will discuss his involvement in the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), scientific collaboration networks, and his current work at Harvard\u27s Center for Astrophysics

From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web

In the process of scientific research, many information objects are generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary, multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST

Collaboration in sensor network research: an in-depth longitudinal analysis of assortative mixing patterns

Many investigations of scientific collaboration are based on statistical analyses of large networks constructed from bibliographic repositories. These investigations often rely on a wealth of bibliographic data, but very little or no other information about the individuals in the network, and thus, fail to illustrate the broader social and academic landscape in which collaboration takes place. In this article, we perform an in-depth longitudinal analysis of a relatively small network of scientific collaboration (N = 291) constructed from the bibliographic record of a research center involved in the development and application of sensor network and wireless technologies. We perform a preliminary analysis of selected structural properties of the network, computing its range, configuration and topology. We then support our preliminary statistical analysis with an in-depth temporal investigation of the assortative mixing of selected node characteristics, unveiling the researchers' propensity to collaborate preferentially with others with a similar academic profile. Our qualitative analysis of mixing patterns offers clues as to the nature of the scientific community being modeled in relation to its organizational, disciplinary, institutional, and international arrangements of collaboration.Comment: Scientometrics (In press

Metropolitan Wi-Fi Research Network at the Los Angeles State Historic Park

UCLA is deploying a metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi mesh network near Downtown Los Angeles. It supports research in community-based urban participatory sensing, which focuses on how people can use their everyday mobile phones as sensors for data gathering on personal, community, and urban scales.  Moreover, we will use it to explore Cultural Civic Computing, a service-oriented urban computing model in which neighborhoods power the processes of imagining, specifying, and designing technology infrastructure for public places. This work provides infrastructure with which to explore the potential that a large scale Wi-Fi deployment offers multicultural communities in investigating and reclaiming their own environments, and creating healthy and livable cities.  It also enables public exploration of creativity and cultural identity, as well as the diverse histories of our cities and neighborhoods

The Networked Naturalist: Mobile phone data collection for citizen science and education

*Background/Question/Methods*
Citizen science projects engage individual volunteers or groups to observe, measure, and contribute data to scientific studies. CENS is building a collection of mobile phone and web-based tools to make the citizen scientist experience more engaging and flexible. CENS is an NSF-funded Information and Technology Center that employs graduate students from Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UCLA to create open-source software that is environmentally and socially responsible. The overarching goal of the Networked Naturalist project is to enhance participatory learning experiences through citizen science campaigns and help transform the associated learning process. We are collaborating with national field campaigns, such Project BudBurst, and also with the National Park Service to increase participation and retention in citizen scientist campaigns through two main avenues afforded by the use of new technologies: (1) to offer new methods for data collection, primarily using mobile phones, through text, picture, and smart-phone applications, and (2) to provide immediate feedback and automated, engaging analysis of data for informal learning opportunities. We are working to create a robust data collection system to enhance citizen science by ensuring data quality and improving data submission, and to transform participation into an active learning, engaging experience.

*Results/Conclusions*
Our experience with volunteers for software testing at UCLA and at the National Park Service has indicated that using mobile phones is an efficient method for collecting environmental and location data and raises public awareness of environmental issues through attracting the attention of the mass media. Individual participation in the What’s Invasive! project by volunteer citizen scientists seems to have been limited by smartphone application availability (iPhone app is currently only available for Santa Monica), although methods for making observations based on text and picture messaging are also available. We have found that running short-term "campaigns" partnered with NPS officials and groups such as schools has been the most effective in not only education-related efforts but also in efficiently identifying and locating species and objects of interest using mobile phones

A secure over-the-air programming scheme in wireless sensor networks

Over-The-Air dissemination of code updates in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been researchers’ point of interest in past a few years and more importantly security challenges toward remote propagation of code update have taken the majority of efforts in this context. Many security models have been proposed to establish a balance between the energy consumption and security strengthen with having their concentration on constraint nature of WSN nodes. For authentication purposes most of them have used Merkle-Hash-Tree to avoid using multiple public cryptography operations. These models mostly have assumed an environment in which security has to be in a standard level and therefore they have not investigated the tree structure for mission-critical situations in which security has to be in maximum possible extent (e.g. military zones). Two major problems have been identified in Merkle Tree structure which is used in Seluge scheme, including: 1) an exponential growth in number of overhead packets when block size of hash algorithm used in design is increased. 2) Limitation of using hash algorithms with larger block size of 11 bytes when payload size is set to 72 bytes. Then several existing security models are investigated for possible vulnerabilities and a set of countermeasures correspondingly named Security Model Requirements (SMR) is provided. After concentrating on Seluge’s design, a new secure Over-The-Air Programming (OTAP) scheme named Seluge++ is proposed that complies with SMR and replaces the use of inefficient Merkle Tree with a novel method