Critter Commercialization
The CMU Pervasive Critter Sensor is now officially licensed to the
new Pennsylvania start-up company, Pervasive Sensors Inc.,
http://www.pervasivesensors.com. The product is now off and running
with Critters already sold by the time I write this. Good Luck to
Pervasive Sensors Inc., as a CMU/ICES and PITA success.
Data Data Data
We have more data than we know what to do with. We have over two
dozen sensors through the ICES rooms, dubbed the West Wing project as
ICES occupies the west wing of Hamburg Hall. You can see a snapshot
of current data at
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~bigrigg/sensornets/ww.html. Hit refresh to
update the display. Most of these sensors have been collecting data
for more than a year now! Collecting data every second, that turns
out to be 31 million data points per sensor and roughly 8 billion
bytes of data.
Thanks!
A big thank you to Veritas Software Corporation,
http://www.veritas.com, for providing the Veritas Storage Replicator
software for us to use to help collect the data into one central
location. This has been a great help! Thank you!
Large Data Visualization
What to do with 800 million data point? Realize that Excel only
permits 65 thousand data points. Our visualization tool was then
designed and built to deal with millions upon millions of data
points. It allows for people to interact with the data by doing data
preprocessing at the sensor given that there are idle cycles and lots
of extra storage. We used lots of the lessons learned from the former
ActiveDisk project.
The Roaming Critter
The Critter has been used at Indiana University of Pennsylvania as
part of their software engineering course. They will be using the
Critter to build a system to help building management (Fall 2004) and
then energy monitoring (Spring 2005).
Machine Room Monitoring
We addressed the problem of machine room monitoring recently by
developing the sensor string. The string allows a row of sensors to
be deployed down the front and the back of each computer in a rack to
monitor each individual computer -- the air intake and the air output.
This allows for detailed analysis of heat per rack unit.
SensorNets Class Projects
The SensorNets class, 39-650, had six projects for the Fall 2004.
They include home security, office security, infrastructure security,
forensics evaluation, EMS support, and transportation monitoring.
Some of the students will be continuing with their projects through
the Spring 2005 term as directed study projects. One of the newest
parts of the projects was the increased use of smart cell phones as
means to control and interact with pervasive sensor networks.
Streaming Data Optimization
There is a great disparity between improvement of CPU performance
and memory performance. RAM speeds have not been increasing as
quickly as the CPU. We took on this problem of streaming data
optimization by doing analysis of cache utilization. It is enough to
say that we have been able to achieve up to a 50% improvement!
The 50% was for benchmark code with a not too shabby improvement of
almost 30% when using normal applications such as the GNU checksum and
wordcount programs. We are looking to apply this research to other
streaming applications such as routers and security processing tools.
Knowledge Management
While not about SensorNets, the AskAndy system was put into beta
this past semester. AskAndy is a knowledge management tool to help
capture knowledge using a simple email/web interface. The hardest
part of KM is getting people to participate. AskAndy makes it easy to
submit information thereby helping with the knowledge process. Anyone
interested in helping to beta test AskAndy let us know.
http://www.ices.cmu.edu/km/askandy.