Table of Contents
Project Summary
2
Participants
4
Technical Narrative
5
Education and Outreach
17
Knowledge Transfer
23
Management Plan
27
Shared Facilities
31
2
Project Summary
During the last decade, networking technologies have revolutionized the ways individuals and organizations
exchange information and coordinate their activities. In this decade we will witness another revolution; one that
involves observation and control of the physical world. The availability of micro-sensors, micro-actuators and
low-power wireless communications will enable the deployment of densely distributed sensor/actuator networks
for a wide range of biological and environmental monitoring applications in marine, soil, and atmospheric
contexts. Moreover, this same technology will be used to monitor, and in some cases control, engineered
structures such as buildings and vehicles. The technology will transform the ways in which we understand and
interact with the physical world. In the context of scientific applications, these capabilities will not only change
the way scientists collect data, but change the nature of the data that can be collected, and consequently the
models that can be developed and verified through data assimilation.
The research focus of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) will be the fundamental science
and engineering research needed to create scalable, robust, adaptive, sensor/actuator networks. The vision of
densely-distributed, networked sensing and actuation requires advances in many areas of information
technology. Moreover, there is a critical interplay between the technology and the applications and physical
context in which it is embedded. By conducting research in the context of specific and high-impact scientific
applications CENS will enable new scientific discovery through high resolution, in situ monitoring and
actuation. At the same time, CENS will explore the fundamental principles and technologies needed to apply
embedded