Engineering ambient visual sensors

Visual sensors are an indispensable prerequisite for those AmI environments that require a surveillance component. One practical issue concerns maximizing the operational longevity of such sensors as the operational lifetime of an AmI environment itself is dependent on that of its constituent components. In this paper, the intelligent agent paradigm is considered as a basis for managing a camera collective such that the conflicting demands of power usage optimization and system performance are reconciled

Mining Explainable Predictive Features for Water Quality Management

With water quality management processes, identifying and interpreting relationships between features, such as location and weather variable tuples, and water quality variables, such as levels of bacteria, is key to gaining insights and identifying areas where interventions should be made. There is a need for a search process to identify the locations and types of phenomena that are influencing water quality and a need to explain how the quality is being affected and which factors are most relevant. This paper addresses both of these issues. A process is developed for collecting data for features that represent a variety of variables over a spatial region and which are used for training models and inference. An analysis of the performance of the features is undertaken using the models and Shapley values. Shapley values originated in cooperative game theory and can be used to aid in the interpretation of machine learning results. Evaluations are performed using several machine learning algorithms and water quality data from the Dublin Grand Canal basin

Intelligent middleware for adaptive sensing of tennis coaching sessions

In professional tennis training matches, the coach needs to be able to view play from the most appropriate angle in order to monitor players activities. In this paper, we present a system which can adapt the operation of a series of cameras in order to maintain optimal system performance based on a set of wireless sensors. This setup is used as a testbed for an agent based intelligent middleware that can correlate data from many different wired and wireless sensors and provide effective in-situ decision making. The proposed solution is flexible enough to allow the addition of new sensors and actuators. Within this setup we also provide details of a case study for the embedded control of cameras through the use of Ubisense data

Citizen OBservatory WEB (COBWEB): A Generic Infrastructure Platform to Facilitate the Collection of Citizen Science Data for Environmental Monitoring

COBWEB has used the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves as a testbed for researching and developing a generic crowdsourcing infrastructure platform for environmental monitoring. A major challenge is dealing with what is necessarily a complex problem requiring sophisticated solutions balanced with the need to present sometimes unsophisticated users with comprehensible and useable software. The components of the COBWEB platform are at different Technology Readiness Levels. This short paper outlines the overall solution and points to quality assurance, standardisation and semantic interoperability as key areas requiring further attention

Citizen OBservatory WEB (COBWEB): A Generic Infrastructure Platform to Facilitate the Collection of Citizen Science data for Environmental Monitoring

The mass uptake of internet connected, GPS enabled mobile devices has resulted in a surge of citizens active in making a huge variety of environmental observations.  The use and reuse potential of these data is significant but currently compromised by a lack of interoperability.  Useable standards either don’t exist, are neglected, poorly understood or tooling is unavailable.  Large volumes of data are being created but exist in silos.  This is a complex problem requiring sophisticated solutions balanced with the need to present sometimes unsophisticated users with comprehensible and useable software.  COBWEB has addressed this challenge by using the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves as a testbed for researching and developing a generic crowdsourcing infrastructure platform for environmental monitoring.   The solution arrived at provides tools for the creation of mobile Applications which generate data compliant with open interoperability standards and facilitate integration with Spatial Data Infrastructures.  COBWEB is a research project and the components of the COBWEB platform are at different Technology Readiness Levels. This paper outlines how the overall solution was arrived at, describes the main components developed and points to quality assurance, integration of sensors, interoperability and associated standardisation as key areas requiring further attention.

Coordinated intelligent power management and the heterogeneous sensing coverage problem

One of the most important factors to be considered when developing an application for a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is its power consumption. Intelligent Power Management (IPM) for a WSN is crucial in maximising the operational longevity. An established regime for achieving this is through the opportunistic hibernation of redundant nodes. Redundancy, however, has various definitions within the field of WSNs and indeed multiple protocols, each operating using a different definition, coexist on the same node. In this paper, we advocate the use of a MAS as an appropriate mechanism by which different stake-holders, each desiring to hibernate a node in order to conserve power, can collaborate. The problem of node hibernation for the heterogeneous sensing coverage areas is introduced and the manner by which it can be solved using ADOPT, an algorithm for distributed constraint optimisation, is described. We illustrate that the node hibernation strategy discussed here is more useful than the traditional stack-based approach and motivate our discussion using intelligent power management as an exemplar.Science Foundation IrelandIrish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technologyau, ti, sp, ke AL 02/06/2010 Published online 2009. 12 months embargo.AV 9/4/10 cannot find actual publication date for this journal - it may not be published yet. Published online 2009. 12 months embargo. Did not put an embargo date, only a check date. AV 9/4/10 Released 14/3/11 based on online publication date - OR Duplicate submitted with embargo until March 2012 so withdrawn on 29/9/201

An agent-based architecture for wireless bus travel assistants

The Second International Workshop on Wireless Information Systems (WIS 2003), April 22-23, 2003, Angers, FranceMulti-agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. This paper describes how a multi-agent architecture has been developed to extend a previously implemented bus travel assistant prototype called Bus Catcher [2]. Such a system was developed to provide accurate information about bus locations and arrival times to Dublin Bus users. The new version of the system is more flexible and easily extensible as it relies on generic agents responsible for channeling context sensitive services. New features have also been added to the system, including user profiling and monitoring of available hardware/service characteristicsOther funderEnterprise Irelandkpw12/7/1

Sos: Accomodation on the fly with ACCESS

17th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium Conference (FLAIRS 2004), Miami Beach, Florida, May 12-14, 2004., Miami Beach, FloridaThis paper introduces Sos, a location aware and context -sensitive accommodation finding service for mobile citizens who require help finding somewhere to stay when they arrive at their chosen destination. Specifically, Sos helps users to find and book hotel accommodation that is most appropriate to their current context. This context combines the users’ current location, personal preferences, hotel availability and agenda (e.g. business meeting, tour of city). Sos has been realized as an agent-based application that has been deployed using the Agents Channelling ContExt Sensitive Services (ACCESS) architecture, an open agentbased architecture that supports the development and deployment of multiple heterogeneous context -sensitive services.Science Foundation IrelandEnterprise Ireland (grant ATRP/01/209) and Science Foundation Ireland through Modelling Collaborative Reasoners (SFI Investigator Award).18/07/13 RBThe AAAI.org link only brings up an abstract, not full-text. R

Autonomous management and control of sensor network-based applications

Paper presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Adaptation in Wireless Sensor Networks (AWSN-09), in conjunction with The 7th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC 2009), August 29 - 31, 2009, Vancouver, CanadaA central challenge facing sensor network research and development is the difficulty in providing effective autonomous management capability. This is due to a large number of parameters to control, unexpected changes of the network topology and dynamic application requirements. Network management is also a challenging task for the remote user due to the large-scale of the network and scarce visibility of live network happenings. Preferably the network should have autonomous decision-making capabilities as network conditions and application requirements changes. To cope with such uncertainties, firstly we consider Octopus, a powerful software tool that provides live information about the network topology and sensor data. At present, the tool can provide monitoring and require a user to control the network state manually. This paper describes how Octopus is reengineered to accommodate a multi-agent system to provide autonomic managing capabilities. In particular, we detail two distinct architectures, the static and mobile agent architectures, which can be effectively applied to deliver autonomous system management. This paper sets the basis for a full autonomous network management via a multi agent system to work with Octopus.Science Foundation IrelandConference detailshttp://tweb.ing.unipi.it/awsn09

Combining Sensor Selection with Routing and Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, determining the set of locations to activate sensors, such that the amount of information received is maximised, is an important task. With the model driven approach to sensor networks, a considerable amount of research has been conducted into the sensor selection problem, whereby informative locations to activate sensors are determined through the use of Gaussian Processes. Current approaches to sensor selection, however, do not take bandwidth constraints into consideration. When bandwidth is limited, the amount of time required to realise a given set of communication requests, in terms of routing and scheduling, must be accounted for. Traditionally, in wireless sensor networks, sensor selection, routing, and scheduling are considered separately. These three processes, however, are highly coupled and the overall utility of the data collection process, in terms of the amount of information it produces, can be improved by integrating them. In this paper, we present two approaches to combining routing, scheduling, and sensor selection such that they inform each other so as to improve the performance of the network in the bandwidth limited case