Internet of things for disaster management: state-of-the-art and prospects

Disastrous events are cordially involved with the momentum of nature. As such mishaps have been showing off own mastery, situations have gone beyond the control of human resistive mechanisms far ago. Fortunately, several technologies are in service to gain affirmative knowledge and analysis of a disaster's occurrence. Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has opened a promising door toward catering of multitude problems related to agriculture, industry, security, and medicine due to its attractive features, such as heterogeneity, interoperability, light-weight, and flexibility. This paper surveys existing approaches to encounter the relevant issues with disasters, such as early warning, notification, data analytics, knowledge aggregation, remote monitoring, real-time analytics, and victim localization. Simultaneous interventions with IoT are also given utmost importance while presenting these facts. A comprehensive discussion on the state-of-the-art scenarios to handle disastrous events is presented. Furthermore, IoT-supported protocols and market-ready deployable products are summarized to address these issues. Finally, this survey highlights open challenges and research trends in IoT-enabled disaster management systems. © 2013 IEEE

Reconfigurable middleware architectures for large scale sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks, in an effort to be energy efficient, typically lack the high-level abstractions of advanced programming languages. Though strong, the dichotomy between these two paradigms can be overcome. The SENSIX software framework, described in this dissertation, uniquely integrates constraint-dominated wireless sensor networks with the flexibility of object-oriented programming models, without violating the principles of either. Though these two computing paradigms are contradictory in many ways, SENSIX bridges them to yield a dynamic middleware abstraction unifying low-level resource-aware task reconfiguration and high-level object recomposition. Through the layered approach of SENSIX, the software developer creates a domain-specific sensing architecture by defining a customized task specification and utilizing object inheritance. In addition, SENSIX performs better at large scales (on the order of 1000 nodes or more) than other sensor network middleware which do not include such unified facilities for vertical integration

Decentralized Convex Optimization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Many real-world applications arising in domains such as large-scale machine learning, wired and wireless networks can be formulated as distributed linear least-squares over a large network. These problems often have their data naturally distributed. For instance applications such as seismic imaging, smart grid have the sensors geographically distributed and the current algorithms to analyze these data rely on centralized approach. The data is either gathered manually, or relayed by expensive broadband stations, and then processed at a base station. This approach is time-consuming (weeks to months) and hazardous as the task involves manual data gathering in extreme conditions. To obtain the solution in real-time, we require decentralized algorithms that do not rely on a fusion center, cluster heads, or multi-hop communication. In this thesis, we propose several decentralized least squares optimization algorithm that are suitable for performing real-time seismic imaging in a sensor network. The algorithms are evaluated and tested using both synthetic and real-data traces. The results validate that our distributed algorithm is able to obtain a satisfactory image similar to centralized computation under constraints of network resources, while distributing the computational burden to sensor nodes

Underwater Acoustic Modems

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Due to the growing interest using underwater acoustic networks, there are more and more research papers about underwater communications. These papers are mainly focused on deployments and studies about the constraints of the underwater medium. The underwater acoustic channel is highly variable and the signal transmission can change according to environmental factors such as the temperature, pressure or salinity of the water. For this reason, it is important to know how these devices are developed and the maximum distance and data transfer rates they can achieve. To this end, this paper presents an exhaustive study of existing underwater acoustic modems where their main features are highlighted. We also review the main features of their hardware. All presented proposals in the research literature are compared with commercial underwater acoustic modems. Finally, we analyze different programs and improvements of existing network simulators that are often used to simulate and estimate the behavior of underwater networks.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion through the Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011 within the Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental under Project TEC2011-27516. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was Dr. Lei Shu. (Corresponding author: Jaime Lloret.)Sendra, S.; Lloret, J.; Jimenez, JM.; Parra-Boronat, L. (2015). Underwater Acoustic Modems. IEEE Sensors Journal. 16(11):4063-4071. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2015.2434890S40634071161

Fiber Optic Acoustic Sensing to Understand and Affect the Rhythm of the Cities: Proof-of-Concept to Create Data-Driven Urban Mobility Models

In the framework of massive sensing and smart sustainable cities, this work presents an urban distributed acoustic sensing testbed in the vicinity of the School of Technology and Telecommunication Engineering of the University of Granada, Spain. After positioning the sensing technology and the state of the art of similar existing approaches, the results of the monitoring experiment are described. Details of the sensing scenario, basic types of events automatically distinguishable, initial noise removal actions and frequency and signal complexity analysis are provided. The experiment, used as a proof-of-concept, shows the enormous potential of the sensing technology to generate data-driven urban mobility models. In order to support this fact, examples of preliminary density of traffic analysis and average speed calculation for buses, cars and pedestrians in the testbed’s neighborhood are exposed, together with the accidental presence of a local earthquake. Challenges, benefits and future research directions of this sensing technology are pointed out.B-TIC-542-UGR20 funded by “Consejería de Universidad, Investigación e Innovacción de la Junta de AndalucíaERDF A way of making Europ

Past, Present and Future of a Habitable Earth

This perspective of this book views Earth's various layers as a whole system, and tries to understand how to achieve harmony and sustainable development between human society and nature, with the theme of " habitability of the Earth." This book is one effort at providing an overview of some of the recent exciting advances Chinese geoscientists have made. It is the concerted team effort of a group of researchers from diverse backgrounds to generalize their vision for Earth science in the next 10 years. The book is intended for scholars, administrators of the Science and Technology policy department, and science research funding agencies. This is an open access book

A Novel Computer Vision-Based Framework For Supervised Classification Of Energy Outbreak Phenomena

Today, there is a need to implement a proper design of an adequate surveillance system that detects and categorizes explosion phenomena in order to identify the explosion risk to reduce its impact through mitigation and preparedness. This dissertation introduces state-of-the-art classification of explosion phenomena through pattern recognition techniques on color images. Consequently, we present a novel taxonomy for explosion phenomena. In particular, we demonstrate different aspects of volcanic eruptions and nuclear explosions of the proposed taxonomy that include scientific formation, real examples, existing monitoring methodologies, and their limitations. In addition, we propose a novel framework designed to categorize explosion phenomena against non-explosion phenomena. Moreover, a new dataset, Volcanic and Nuclear Explosions (VNEX), was collected. The totality of VNEX is 10, 654 samples, and it includes the following patterns: pyroclastic density currents, lava fountains, lava and tephra fallout, nuclear explosions, wildfires, fireworks, and sky clouds. In order to achieve high reliability in the proposed explosion classification framework, we propose to employ various feature extraction approaches. Thus, we calculated the intensity levels to extract the texture features. Moreover, we utilize the YCbCr color model to calculate the amplitude features. We also employ the Radix-2 Fast Fourier Transform to compute the frequency features. Furthermore, we use the uniform local binary patterns technique to compute the histogram features. Additionally, these discriminative features were combined into a single input vector that provides valuable insight of the images, and then fed into the following classification techniques: Euclidian distance, correlation, k-nearest neighbors, one-against-one multiclass support vector machines with different kernels, and the multilayer perceptron model. Evaluation results show the design of the proposed framework is effective and robust. Furthermore, a trade-off between the computation time and the classification rate was achieved

Past, Present and Future of a Habitable Earth

This perspective of this book views Earth's various layers as a whole system, and tries to understand how to achieve harmony and sustainable development between human society and nature, with the theme of " habitability of the Earth." This book is one effort at providing an overview of some of the recent exciting advances Chinese geoscientists have made. It is the concerted team effort of a group of researchers from diverse backgrounds to generalize their vision for Earth science in the next 10 years. The book is intended for scholars, administrators of the Science and Technology policy department, and science research funding agencies. This is an open access book