Christopher Gibson

Flavio Bergamaschi

Sensor Fabric and Data Management

The diverse set of asset types and networking technologies commonly used in fielded sensor networks provide a unique set of challenges in the areas of sensor identification, interoperability, and sensor data consumability. The ITA Sensor Fabric is a middleware infrastructure – developed as part of Technical Area 3, Project 8 – that addresses these challenges by providing unified access to, and management of, sensor networks. It facilitates universal access to intelligence and sensor data from any point on the Fabric, maximizing its availability and utility to mission planning services, analysis applications (including fusion algorithms and agents), human analysts, and mobile forces.

In addition to its use with fielded sensor networks, the Fabric can also be used as a research tool that facilitates bringing together many areas of ITA. Its plug-in architecture (ideal for testing new algorithms), sensor data record and playback capability, sensor simulation, and performance measurement, make it an ideal platform for performing repeatable experiments in an environment that has a high degree of fidelity with fielded systems.

This tutorial will provide an opportunity to learn about:

-    Installation and configuration of the Fabric
-    The distributed Fabric Registry
-    Development and testing of algorithms
-    Deployment in a sensor network, and the integration of new sensors
-    Sensor data recording and playback
-    Extending the capabilities of the Fabric
-    Fabric instrumentation and performance measurement
-    The Fabric and policy

Many ITA technologies, techniques, and algorithms can be integrated with the Fabric providing significant opportunities for experimentation, evaluation, and an accelerated route to use in the field. Notable successes have already been achieved with ARL (deployment of the Fabric for field trial data capture), the University of Aberdeen (sensor/mission matching), and Project 4 (policy). As such this event will benefit: researchers developing new algorithms (from all Technical Areas and Projects); researchers wishing to test algorithms with fielded sensor networks; users and developers of fielded sensor networks; and all those interested in sensor network middleware platforms.

The Sensor Fabric tutorial will be structured as a lecture from the Fabric’s developers (Christopher Gibson and Flavio Bergamaschi), and will span introductory material through to code examples.

David Braines

Paul Smart

Practical semantic integration

We will define semantic integration, explain why it is useful, differentiate it from other (non-semantic) techniques for integration and then go on to give a practical demonstration of semantic integration using easily available data sources, common semantic web tools and techniques, and showcase the usage of some of the Semantic Web based techniques for alignment and interoperability that have come out of ITA research in this area.  Our specific focus will be one integration of existing data sources and existing instance data, largely from small lightweight ontologies.  We will not be focusing on the more traditional "model based" alignment and mapping concerns that are usually associated with large scale ontologies although we will briefly mention these in order to contrast our approach.

Attendees should have a basic understanding of data integration or semantic integration concepts, and ideally a basic understand of Semantic Web technologies although this is not mandatory as we will be introducing these technologies at the beginning of the workshop.

Semantic integration is primarily of interest to researchers in the areas of distributed coalition planning and decision making, although semantic integration techniques are also relevant to issues in the sensor information processing and delivery domain and in some cases to security and policy management.   Semantic integration is a powerful and useful core component to be used when dealing with multiple disparate systems and distributed data in heterogeneous formats, situations that are commonplace to most ITA research concerns.

This workshop is comprised on a series of presentations introducing the domain,  showcasing example techniques and approaches, and will be concluded with a 30 minute discussion between the speakers, invited guests and attendees

Mani Srivastava

Mario Gerla

Bolek Szymanski

Kin Leung

Kang-won Lee

Trevor Ellis (Transport for London (TfL))

Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge)
 

Urban Sensing

The aim of this workshop is to discuss challenges and present on-going research in network architecture and services for military operations and homeland defense applications in urban spaces. A traditional approach for such sensing is to instrument physical spaces with embedded sensors to monitor physical and human activities, which is often insufficient in uncertain urban sensing environments. Embedding sufficient sensing resources across neighborhoods and cities is simply too costly, requires broad deployments that are likely to be either aesthetically or politically unacceptable; and, ultimately prove to be inflexible in the face of diverse missions, unknown coverage requirements, and sensing uncertainties. An alternative vision of sensing in urban spaces has begun to emerge based on sensing by the public itself. Termed as Participatory Sensing, this entails exploiting for sensing the natural mobility of people through and between spaces they live, work, and commute in. Such a system can coordinate data capture by people using sensors embedded in their vehicles as well as cell phones that are already equipped with acoustic, image, and location sensors (and have Bluetooth interface to which external sensors can be connected). Cell phones can be valuable tools for people to contribute human intelligence as they provide text and graphics entry for the manual description and annotation of events observed by people during the course of their daily lives. Sensors embedded in vehicles offer complementary advantages of fewer constraints on the processing, sensing, and communication platform. This workshop will address recent research in participatory sensing in creating network services, models, and protocols for realizing this vision of turning the vehicles and cell phones in an urban space into a fluid substrate for hosting widespread but coordinated participatory sensing of urban spaces.
The workshop is structured as a set of plenary speakers followed by a panel. The talks by plenary speakers would collectively address the unique urban sensing requirements and opportunities in military and homeland defense applications, and descrive experience from urban sensing deployments. The panel would have short talks by various ITA researchers describing on-going research activities focusing on problems such as: identifying and coordinating vehicles and people for specific sensing tasks; passive (autonomous) vs. active (human coordinated) sensing; exploiting sensing and data sharing opportunities that present themselves as people and vehicles move around; optimization of sampling coverage while assuring credibility and quality of sensor data; sensor information storage, processing, sharing, and search optimized for disconnected operation and opportunistic mobility; mechanisms for incentivizing people to participate; and modeling of mobility, availability, social interactions, sensing performance, privacy constraints, and trustworthiness of people and vehicles.

Diego Pizzocaro

Daniele Masato

Nikoletta Sofra

Konrad Borowiecki

David Emele Chukwuemeka

Chris Burnett

Hosam Rowaihy
Matthew P. Johnson

Doctoral Symposium

Workshop aim
The ITA Doctoral Symposium is intended to be an event specifically aimed at training and supporting PhD students involved in the ITA Project. The main goal is indeed to provide a forum for doctoral students to present their work and obtain guidance from experts as well as to help planning the future.

Event benefits
This event will benefit the ITA Project by encouraging collaborations across different technical areas and by laying the foundations for a community of students who will feel part of the same research environment. We also aim to help the sponsors to communicate to the students what their expectations are, so that students can identify the ways in which they can contribute the most to the Project.
Students that will register to the ITA Doctoral Symposium will be given the possibility to present a poster on their research. The posters may be shown during the entire length of the main conference, allowing the students to receive as much feedback on their work as possible.

Organization
The workshop will be divided into three main sessions:

1. First session (45 minutes): a keynote held by John Ibbotson, one of the relevant figures in the ITA. John Ibbotson is a Senior Member and Master Inventor at IBM UK, as well as Project Champion for Project 13. He is also pursuing a PhD at Southampton University (UK). As Project 13 Champion, he will give the students an overview of the Project, followed by some insight on his career in Industry and his PhD development.

2. Second session (60 minutes): a panel of three/four experts from Academia,Industry and the Military that will focus on the topic ‚"How to choose a careerpath?". Given the unique structure of the ITA, it will be possible to highlightthe differences between Academia, Industry and Government careers.Confirmed panelists at the moment are John Ibbotson, Tien Pham (Army Research Laboratory, US), Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge, UK) andMike Strub (Army Research Laboratory, US & Defense Science andTechnology Laboratory, UK):
 - Tien Pham is the Government Technical Area Leader for Technical Area 3,as well as a Project 7 collaborator.
 - Jon Crowcroft is a member of the Consortium Management Committee and he works within Technical Area 1.
 - Mike Strub is Government Technical Area Leader (together with Jitu Patel) for Technical Area 4 as well as a Project 10 collaborator.

The panel discussion could start with a brief introduction from the panelists about their role within the Project and the institution they work for. To follow,the discussion would touch on topics as what makes such institution/role stimulating, and and what is its impact on the field, or on science. Other interesting subjects may be what skills and abilities a student would requireto pursue a career in the field/institution in which the panelists are involved and how easy would be to get an interview. Also, what are the expectationsof the institution from its employee and what gratifications could a candidate benefit of by working in that particular field.

3. Third session (90 minutes): a set of 6 talks (15 minutes each) given by PhD students in which they will present an overview of their research work.  Presenters will be able to receive feedback from their peers and from the expert panel; at the same time the student audience will understand the methodologies and approaches used by their peers facing the typical challenges of pursuing a PhD (e.g. formulating working hypothesis, doing literature review, evaluating results, etc.).

The attendance to the Doctoral Symposium is FREE for all ITA PhD Students,on the condition that it must be the only workshop they are attending. Payment of the workshop fee is required if students plan to attend any other workshop on thesame day.