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IEEE DS Online Exclusive Content Global IS WINES: Wired and Wireless Intelligent Networked Systems • The UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) launched its Wired and Wireless Intelligent Networked Systems program in 2004 to address research challenges in creating massive-scale ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments. WINES assumes an intelligent, pervasive information and communications technology environment will eventually emerge in which users experience a rich variety of heterogeneous services and systems, delivered through a wide range of devices. Users might carry or wear such devices, or the devices could be embedded in buildings and vehicles. WINES supports multidisciplinary research consortia seeking to apply techniques from various research communities—computing, electronics, materials, engineering, and the physical and social sciences—to specific application domains. It requires each group to target at least two of the program's nine key areas: autonomous systems, context awareness, human factors and social issues, information management and provenance, programming and design tools, sensor systems, systems theory, trust security and privacy, and wireless communications. To encourage new collaborations, it recommends that consortia members include representatives from both academia and industry. The consortia must be based in the UK and aren't required to be multi-institutional, but WINES views a mix of age and experience within a consortium as advantageous and encourages close industrial and public-sector collaboration as well as collaboration outside of the UK. WINES posted its first call for proposals (pdf) in August 2004, and in March 2005, it awarded £7.8 million in funding to seven groups. Here I examine the objectives of four of the seven projects to provide a cross section of the activities in WINES. TIME-EACM: Intelligent transportation systemsTransport Information Monitoring Environment: Event Architecture and Context Management (TIME-EACM) is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the University of London's Birkbeck College. The project is part of TIME, a larger academic and industry collaboration in transport monitoring launched in 2004 in Cambridge. TIME's industrial partners include BT (British Telecom, the specific partner on TIME-EACM), Boeing, IBM, Oracle, and Vodafone. TIME researchers hypothesize that monitoring, distributing, and processing traffic information will significantly increase transport efficiency. In particular, they view timely information as a key enabler in the wider acceptance and uptake of public transport. Cambridge is an ideal testbed for this research because of its diverse economy (including high-tech companies), variety of transport links (road, rail, bus, and so forth), and proximity to London. In the next decade, Cambridge is projected to have 50,000 new jobs, 42,000 new homes, a 36 percent increase in car trips, and a 57 percent increase in public-transportation volume. Moreover, Cambridge already suffers from severe traffic congestion. TIME-EACM aims to give application developers a uniform, open platform of event-based middleware that will let them share gathered data in a controlled and secure way. Furthermore, the middleware platform will help keep the data robust despite changes in the underlying network and sensor technology. The goal is to help integrate existing and future transport information systems, such as those monitoring traffic density, providing information displays at bus stops, controlling traffic signals to ease congestion, routing emergency vehicles, and displaying live data on parking-lot capacities and taxi availability. Currently, such systems offer only one service and are vertically integrated—the various tiers of software architecture serve a single set of requirements. An information platform that adds horizontal integration, delivering multiple sets of requirements and services through interconnected tiers, will help researchers develop algorithms that can statically analyze data and infer trends. In turn, policy makers could use this information for long-term planning—for example, for decisions on toll-road fees or congestion charging. BiosensorNet: Autonomic biosensor networksBiosensorNet consists of teams from computing, biomedical engineering, electronic engineering, and medicine at Imperial College London. The project goal is to create intelligent, self-managing, context-aware biosensing networks to improve patient care. New miniaturized wireless biosensor technology provides site-specific information from the body, providing valuable data sets on which to base clinical decisions (see figure 1). These new sensors will form the basis of future pervasive healthcare systems, which will monitor patients as they go about their everyday activities. Such systems will notify patients and healthcare workers of problems and compile data for trend analysis and medical research.
Figure 1. (a) An onbody wireless sensor node detects current activity, such as body temperature; (b) cardiac monitoring via implanted sensors, powered by heart motion, relays information to the onbody wireless node. The node then collates information from multiple sensors and forwards it to the patient's PDA or phone, which then sends the information to a remote medical monitoring system. These developments should reshape operating practices in clinical medicine, especially in preventing terminal illness, monitoring a chronic disease's progression, and assessing postoperative care and body reaction to complex therapeutic drug regimes. BiosensorNet hopes the networks it develops will provide a practical platform for in vivo sensing within a generic autonomic sensing architecture. The platform will need to integrate local analog signal processing with ultralow-power sensor interfaces and wireless data paths. Developing novel power scavenging and management with in situ analog processing will significantly impact future wireless-sensor-network design. The network must recognize the environment and physical context within which the signal is sensed. It also must form an autonomic system capable of self-configuring a network of sensors to provide reliable long-term adaptive sensing by fusing error-prone signals from individual sensors. Although BiosensorNet is situated in the healthcare domain, potential applications of the autonomic sensing technology lie in diverse areas such as the environment, manufacturing, food processing, chemical process monitoring, battlefield reconnaissance, and transportation. Cityware: Urban design and pervasive systemsCityware examines the design of pervasive systems featuring information and communications technology systems as integral elements of manmade environments in urban areas. This will require designers to think about architectural spaces in new ways—as interaction spaces wherein people discover and use information and services that support their movements and behavior within those architectural spaces. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between architects and computer scientists at the University of Bath, Imperial College London, and University College London. Recent research has addressed some aspects of pervasive systems in the relatively small-scale architecture of individual buildings or rooms, but Cityware considers such systems on a much larger scale. It aims to develop a set of well-founded, empirically tested, and practically applicable principles, tools, and techniques for the design and implementation of city-scale, long-term pervasive systems. In doing so, the project expects to advance our understanding of people's relationships with urban space and with public pervasive technologies. These developments will advance theory and practice in the areas of designing space, context awareness, service discovery, trust, security, and privacy. Cityware researchers will conduct extensive evaluations by deploying a city-scale pervasive system that incorporates the research results. They'll also perform longitudinal empirical studies of people's lifestyles and relationships with urban space and pervasive technologies. NEMO: Networked embedded modelsNEMO is a three-way collaboration between the computing, management, and psychology departments at Lancaster University. The project is looking into ubiquitous computing technologies and embedded wireless systems for industrial workplaces. It focuses on developing and using smart artifacts—work-related objects such as tools and containers augmented with embedded computing, sensing, and wireless communication capabilities. Industrial partners Agilent, BP, Carillion, and In Touch are closely involved. The vision of networked physical entities represents a radical departure from the prevailing wireless sensor-network approach. The new approach relocates decision-making competence from the back-end infrastructure to the object itself, so it's "where the action is." Networked physical entities promise self-organizing activity-support systems that can handle decisions when and where required. This new quality will extend the reach of activity support systems to new application scenarios with important implications for safety-critical applications. A key issue in NEMO is the development of embedded activity models for in situ decision making. The goal is to enable physical entities to recognize the work activities they're involved in, to interpret these with respect to their safety-critical nature, and, if necessary, to inform the human operator about dangerous or unwanted situations. In effect, NEMO aims to turn physical entities into active knowledge sources for human actors who perform safety-critical work activities. In connection with this goal, NEMO is investigating the notion of life-long memories associated with physical tools, artifacts, and goods (addressing but reinterpreting the UK's "Memories for Life" Grand Challenge). The goal is to enable physical entities to capture, process, and share their "experiences" so researchers can perform long-term analyses of the entities' individual and collective activity patterns. The three other Wines projects in the works are
Additionally, a second call for proposals (WINES II) closed in September, with a further investment on the order of £5 million. Of the 37 outline proposals submitted, the committee selected 11 and asked for full proposals. After peer-review, the proposers will present their vision to an expert panel in March 2006, when the final decisions will be made. Hopefully, the innovative research and synergy Wines has fostered will lead to future funding opportunities as well. The application domains covered by current and future Wines projects offer rich and challenging testbeds for intelligent systems research and development. Acknowledgments Thanks to Nafeesa Simjee (Information and Communications Technology Program, EPSRC) for help in compiling this article and to members of the Wines first-call-funded projects for their input.
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Alun Preece is a senior lecturer
at the University of Aberdeen. Contact him at 