Sensing the World: UCLA Engineering’s
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing Holds Public Review
The UCLA School of Engineering’s Center for Embedded Networked
Sensing (CENS) shared an overview of its work from the past year
at its third annual public research review on Friday, October
28. The Center, which focuses on applying embedded networked sensing
systems technology to critical scientific and social applications,
hosted a variety of panels which explored topics such as the challenges
of placing sensors in varying environments, powering the sensors,
making sensors commonplace in monitoring the environment, and
legal issues. A noontime session also showcased a wide variey
of student projects.
"Embedded networked sensing systems may prove
to be as important a technology as the Internet, expanding people's
ability to interact with the physical world in revolutionary ways,"
says Deborah Estrin, CENS director and computer science professor
at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
"Not only can we collect information that previously was
not available, but we can now design systems to automatically
take action once a pollutant, structural failure, or other hazard
is detected."
An interdisciplinary and multi-institutional venture,
CENS involves hundreds of faculty, engineers, graduate student
researchers, and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines
at UCLA and its partner institutions. Researchers are working
to build an infrastructure resource for society that monitors
and collects information on such diverse subjects as plankton
colonies, endangered species, soil and air contaminants, medical
patients, and buildings, bridges, and other man-made structures
to reveal previously unobservable phenomena.
Like the Internet, these large-scale, distributed
systems, composed of smart sensors and actuators embedded in the
physical world, will eventually infuse the entire world at a physical
level instead of virtual.
CENS partner institutions include the University
of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California,
University of California, Riverside, California Institute of Technology,
University of California at Merced and California State University
at Los Angeles.
To learn more about CENS and its research, visit
the CENS Web site at http://research.cens.ucla.edu/.
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