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BLOSSOMS: Building Lightweight Optimized Sensor Systems on a Massive Scale

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Abstract

As a joint effort between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the BLOSSOMS sensor network project aims to identify research issues at all levels from practical applications down to the design of sensor nodes. In this project, a heterogeneous sensor array including different types of application-dependent sensors as well as monitoring sensors and intruding sensors are being developed. Application-dependent power-aware communication protocols are also being studied for communications among sensor nodes. An ontology-based middleware is built to relieve the burden of application developers from collecting, classifying and processing messy sensing contexts. This project is also developing a set of tools allowing researchers to model, simulate/emulate, analyze, and monitor various functions of sensor networks.

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Correspondence to Wen Gao.

Additional information

This work is supported in part by Grants 20046040 and 20034020 from ICT, CAS and Grants HKUST6161/03E and HKUST6158/03E from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC).

Wen Gao received his two Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo, in 1988 and 1991 respectively. He served as the chairman of steering committee for intelligent computing system in 863 Hi-Tech programme from 1996 to 2001. He is the head of Chinese delegation to MPEG. He is also the chair of AVS working group which is an entity to make and evaluate the national standard for audio/video coding system. His research interests include application of artificial intelligence, multimiedia, data compression, face recognition, sign language recognition and synthesis, image retrieval, and multimodal interface.

Lionel M. Ni earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1980. He is professor and Head of Computer Science Department of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include parallel architectures, distributed systems, high-speed networks, and pervasive computing. He is a fellow of IEEE. Dr. Ni has chaired many professional conferences and has received a number of awards for authoring outstanding papers. His paper (with his former student, Chris Glass) “The Turn Model for Adaptive Routing” was selected as one of the 41 most significant impact papers in the last 25 years in computer architecture area in 1998. He also won the Michigan State University Distinguished Faculty Award in 1994.

Zhi-Wei Xu received his Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from University of Southern California in 1987. He is professor and Vice Director of ICT, CAS. He serves on the Editorial Board of International Journal of Grid Computing. His research interests include grid computing, parallel architectures and pervasive computing.

S. C. Cheung received his B.Eng. (Hons.) degree in the electrical engineering from the University of Hong Kong in 1984. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computing from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London, London, U.K in 1988 and 1994, respectively. He is an associate professor of computer science and associate director of CyberSpace Center at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has served actively on the program committees of international conferences on software engineering, distributed systems and web technologies. His research interests include software engineering, sensor networks, pervasive computing, services computing and information security.

Li Cui received the B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China, in 1985 and the M.Sc. degree from the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1988, where she worked on solid state and electrochemical sensors. She received the Ph.D. degree in electronic nose application from the University of Glasgow, UK, in 1999. She is currently a professor at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include sensor technology and sensor networks.

Qiong Luo is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She received her Ph.D. degree in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, in 2002. Her research interests are database systems, with a focus on data management and analysis techniques related to network applications. Her current research is focused on query processing in pervasive computing and sensor networks.

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Gao, W., Ni, L.M., Xu, ZW. et al. BLOSSOMS: Building Lightweight Optimized Sensor Systems on a Massive Scale. J Comput Sci Technol 20, 105–177 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0012-6

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