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Wireless Sensor Networks:
Enabling technology for AmI
The research activity of AmI (Ambient Intelligence) Group
at Bologna University spans multiple aspects of distributed
embedded and mobile systems design, with special emphasis
on location, user and context aware intelligent media delivery
and capture, that enable the so called Ambient Intelligence.
Targeted applications concern navigation in immersive virtual
environments, interactive gaming and personalized services
for mobile users. The research focus on the design and implementation
of the hardware/software infrastructure, which mainly involves
two research issues.
First, personal devices should be able to give the user ubiquitous
access to multimedia services made available by the surrounding
environment. Moreover, personal information systems should
be equipped with sensors and actuators to provide fast and
natural interaction to control or receive feedback from the
environment. System resources should be controlled in a power
efficient way in order to enhance wearability and ubiquity.
For this reason, design of low-power operating systems and
applications is a critical issue.
Second, the surrounding environment, composed by mobile terminals
and infrastructure elements (such as servers, network access
points), should be able to extract the required information
about the user to enable user-dependent services without involving
an explicit request where possible.
This involves the design of distributed sensing elements (fixed
or mobile) performing for example position localization, body
tracking. In this context, the design of collaborative distributed
applications supported by an efficient communication stack
is critical.
The research approach followed by the group is based on a
mix of theory and practice. Theoretical research results are
applied to fully working hardware devices. The group currently
works on both commercial off the shelf products and hardware
prototypes, that allow to hardware and software design issues.
The research is carried out at several levels starting from
hardware prototype design, operating systems and middleware,
application development and system integration. The work plan
is organized in three main projects, each of them is described
in the following and covers both issues described before.
1. Enabling Technologies
The practical implementation of intelligent spaces calls
for development supporting and partially independent technologies
that can be separately studied in a first phase and put together
in a second phase. Some projects going on at AmI Group are
based on development of such technologies. Activities are
grouped here after.
2. Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks are one
of the first real world examples of pervasive computing, the
notion that small, smart, and cheap sensing and computing
devices will eventually permeate the environment. Though the
technology is still in its early days, the range of potential
applications is mind-boggling. They present a range
of computer systems challenges because they are closely coupled
to the physical world with all its unpredictable variation,
noise, and asynchrony; they involve many energy-constrained,
resource-limited devices operating in concert; they must be
largely self-organizing, self-maintaining and robust despite
significant noise, loss, and failure.
3. Interactive Virtual Reality and Gaming
One of our favorite test-bed for our prototype is Immersive
Virtual Reality and in particular Virtual Heritage (VR applied
to Cultural Heritage). In fact it is a promising and challenging
application domain for advanced digital communication and
processing. The rapid evolution of hardware and software pervasive
computing technologies creates many opportunities for bringing
VH applications to a new level of user participation, where
interactive, multimedia data streams can be exchanged, in
real-time, among untethered users working together in a complex
virtual environment. IVR is suitable also for testing Natural
human-computer interfaces (HCI), a critical technology for
enriching social and cultural interactions with advanced computing
environments.
About our research...
Wireless Sensor Networks
(pdf)
Ambient
Intelligence (pdf)
Wireless Sensor
Networks: enabling technology for AmI (pdf)
Visit also the following old pages
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