SEMINARS:
  

Invited Seminar:

TinyOS: An Open Operating System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Philip Alexander Levis (Stanford University)

Moore's law has led to a new class of computing device, wireless sensor networks. Made up of many nodes, most of which have very limited energy and resources, sensor networks have the potential to transform a wide range of fields, such as structural health monitoring, resource management, scientific research, and public health. This different application pull, combined with extreme power limitations, leads a sensor node operating system to take very different approaches than traditional computing classes.

Over the past few years, TinyOS has grown from a small research project to the dominant operating system for low power wireless sensor networks. In this tutorial, we will detail TinyOS and how the novel constraints of sensor networks led to its design. Beginning with early versions, we will describe how the open source TinyOS project has evolved in the past and its future directions, such as the

formation of an open TinyOS alliance made up of industry and academics and the formation of working groups to tackle technical challenges the community faces. We will cover the role TinyOS plays in current deployed sensor networks, the emerging network architecture within the TinyOS cloud, and what implications these clouds have on current and future Internet systems.

Philip Alexander Levis

Philip Levis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He researches wireless sensor network systems, protocols, and languages. His work, used by thousands of research groups worldwide, includes the TinyOS operating system, the Maté application specific virtual machine framework, the nesC language, dissemination protocols, the TOSSIM simulator, and sensor network architectures.

Seminar 1:

Data Access Techniques for Location-Based Services

Jianliang Xu (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Baihua Zheng (Singapore Management University)
Wang-Chien Lee (Pennsylvania State University)

Location based service (LBS) is emerging as a killer application in mobile data services thanks to the rapid development in wireless communication and location positioning technologies. Users with location-aware wireless devices can query about their surroundings (e.g., finding the nearest Japanese restaurant or all shopping malls within 5 miles) at any place, anytime. While this ubiquitous computing paradigm brings great convenience for information access, the constraints of mobile environments, the spatial property of location-dependent data, and the mobility of mobile users pose a great challenge for the provision of location-based services to mobile users. This seminar will provide an overview of research issues arising from accessing of location-based services in a mobile computing environment and discuss the state-of-the-art solutions. In particular, it will focus the discussions on the following topic areas: 1) location positioning techn! ologies; 2) query processing; 3) cache management; and 4) privacy and security.

Jianliang Xu

Jianliang Xu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his BEng degree in computer science and engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1998, and his PhD degree in computer science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2002. His research interests include mobile and pervasive computing, wireless sensor networks, and distributed systems, with an emphasis on data management. He has published over 40 technical papers in these areas, many in prestigious journals and conferences, including SIGMOD, MobiSys, ICDE, EDBT, INFOCOM, TKDE, and VLDBJ. He has served as a session chair and program committee member for many international conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM and MDM. He is currently a program committee co-chair of International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Information Management (P2PIM'06). For more information, please visit http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~xujl.

Baihua Zheng

Baihua Zheng received the BEng degree in computer science and engineering from Zhejiang University in 1999, and the PhD degree in computer science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2003. She is an assistant professor in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Her research interests include mobile/pervasive computing, spatial database, and data privacy. She has served as TPC members for several international conferences including IEEE ICDE 2007, DASFAA 2006, WISE 2006, and ACM SAC 2006. She is a member of ACM and IEEE. For more information, please visit http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/bhzheng/.

Wang-Chien Lee

Wang-Chien Lee is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.S. from the Information Science Department, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, his M.S. from the Computer Science Department, Indiana University, and his Ph.D. from the Computer and Information Science Department, the Ohio State University. Prior to joining Penn State, he was a principal member of the technical staff at Verizon/GTE Laboratories, Inc. Dr. Lee performs cross-area research in database systems, pervasive/mobile computing, and networking. He is particularly interested in developing data management techniques (including accessing, indexing, caching, aggregation, dissemination, and query processing) for supporting complex queries in a wide spectrum of networking and mobile environments such as peer-to-peer networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, and wireless broadcast systems. Dr. Le! e is very active in various academic and industrial activities. He has taught several tutorials in top database and mobile computing conferences (e.g., ICDE and MobiCom). He has served as a guest editor for several journal special issues on mobile database-related topics, including IEEE Transaction on Computer, IEEE Personal Communications Magazine, ACM MONET, and ACM WINET. He was the founding program committee co-chair for the International Conference on Mobile Data Management. He is a member of the IEEE and the Association for Computer Machinery. For more information, please visit http://www.cse.psu.edu/~wlee.

Seminar 2:

Network-Aware Wireless Sensor Data Management

Vladimir I. Zadorozhny (University of Pittsburgh)
Panos K. Chrysanthis (University of Pittsburgh)

Sensor Networks have brought closer than ever before the network and database research communities. A novel sensor data management paradigm appeared with the development of data-centric routing protocols viewing the network as a huge distributed database. However, this paradigm is typically supported through a query processing layer that treats the wireless network as a black box and underestimates its fundamental limitations. In this seminar we elaborate on these limitations and utilize them in favor of efficient data management in wireless sensor environments.

In the first part of the seminar, we will cover relevant background in wireless networks and review specific requirements for data-intensive sensor applications. We will introduce data management strategies that properly fuse network and database techniques for efficient query processing in wireless sensor networks. We will consider cross-layer query optimization that utilizes the information about how the lower networks layers operate while processing sensor queries. An example of such an optimization is collision-aware query scheduling that avoids wherever possible simultaneous transmissions in the same collision domain.

In the second part, we consider how proposed network-aware techniques can facilitate data delivery in mobile sensor networks. In particular, we will introduce multicriteria optimization strategies to capture various mobility trade-offs in sensornets. We will compare these techniques with existing wireless network standards and explore to which extent they help sensor networks to meet QoS and QoD requirements at higher data rates and heavy network loads.

Vladimir I. Zadorozhny

Vladimir I. Zadorozhny is an Assistant Professor in Department of Information Science and Telecommunications, University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the Institute for

Problems of Informatics, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Before coming to USA he was a Principal Research Fellow in the Institute of System Programming, Russian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include networked information systems, wireless and sensor data management, query optimization in resource-constrained distributed environments, and scalable architectures for wide-area environments with heterogeneous information servers. His research has been funded by DARPA and NSF. He has published over 30 papers in journals and peer-reviewed conferences and workshops in the field of data management. His publications also include book chapters and tutorials on advanced data management techniques in highly distributed environments. Dr. Zadorozhny has served on program committees of multiple Database and Distributed Computing Conferences. He also co-chaired the technical program of MDDS 2005. He is! a member of ACM SIGMOD and IEEE Computer Society. His complete professional bio is available at WWW: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~vladimir/.

Panos K. Chrysanthis

Panos K. Chrysanthis is a Professor of Computer Science and of Telcommunication at the University of Pittsburgh and an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his B.S. from the University of Athens, Greece and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.His current research focus is on mobile and pervasive data management including sensor networks. In 1995, he was a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award for his investigation on the management of data for mobile and wireless computing.His research accomplishments have been published in over 100 papers in journals and peer-reviewed conferences and workshops in the field of data management. In addition, his publications include a book and book chapters and tutorials on transaction processing and data access in distributed, mobile and web databases.He is on the editorial board of the VLDB Journal, and was program chair of several workshops and conferences re! lated to mobile data management.More recently, he was the ICDE 2004 Vice Chair for the area of distributed, parallel and mobile databases and the General Chair of MobiDE 2003 and MDM 2005. This year he is the PC Co-chair for MobiDE 2006. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.His complete bio is available at WWW: http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~panos/.