At RESCUE center, there was a very interesting presentation by Estrin, Burke, and Srivastava on use of mobile sensors as an organic sensor networks that could be used for many interesting applications. These researchers have been leaders in sensor networks. They used to study simple sensor networks formed using motes but are now starting to look at more complex sensors that are increasingly appearing in mobile phones. These are different kinds of networks and open doors for many interesting applications:
Two billion people carry mobile phones. These ubiquitous devices can act as sensor nodes: they are increasingly capable of capturing, classifying and transmitting image, acoustic, location and other data, interactively or autonomously. Though there is much interest and research in distributed sensing for the sciences, industry and defense, we know much less about its function and utility in the public sphere, when the components are owned and operated by everyday users.
These sensors will form infrastructure needed for creating eventweb for some interesting — as yet unimagined applications. It will be truly interesting to see how this direction of research evolves.
Here I am directly providing you a link to the Seraja event that I created for their talk — you can find it at
http://www.seraja.com/event/548903
Â