Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Sensors

Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Habitats

Dan Fay — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:35:20 GMT

There is a new article on the MSR Cambridge project on Skomer Island -Microsoft scientists unveil new technology to give early warning of sensitive species’ response to changing environments. Also interesting is the use of the ScatterWeb .NET SDK from the Freie Universität Berlin.

ScatterWeb .NET SDK is a new approach to working with wireless sensor networks. It hides the complexity of embedded programming and makes it easy to handle objects representing wireless sensors.

Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Habitats
In this project, we are developing a number of technologies that we hope will be instrumental in enabling this goal. We are currently using this system on Skomer Island to monitor the behaviour of the Manx Shearwater.
In close collaboration with Oxford University and the Freie Universitat Berlin, we have developed an innovative system that can autonomously monitor animals and their habitats. Using a combination of wireless sensor networks and innovative software we are able to intelligently gather data from remote locations, relaying it back for local storage and processing and allow remote reconfiguration of the network by research scientists.

Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Habitats

Microsoft Research SenseCam

Dan Fay — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:49:56 GMT

Just heard the MSR Sensors and Device Group in Cambridge updated their SenseCam website with information on the latest version as well as all the great research happening around Alleviating Memory Loss with patients in early stages of Alzheimer's Disease. This is great to see...

Check out the article as well - Memorable Support for SenseCam Memory-Retention Research

Microsoft Research SenseCam

SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images.

SenseCam also contains a number of different electronic sensors. These include light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared (body heat) detector, a temperature sensor, and a multiple-axis accelerometer. These sensors are monitored by the camera’s microprocessor, and certain changes in sensor readings can be used to automatically trigger a photograph to be taken.

Microsoft Research SenseCam

MSR Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit updated

Dan Fay — Wed, 09 May 2007 05:54:37 GMT

The MSR Sense toolkit was updated to v.2a1 and is available for download

The MSR Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit (MSR Sense) is a collection of software tools that allow users to collect, process, archive, and visualize data from a sensor network. The current version contains: a reconfigurable microserver execution environment (miuSEE), a small library implementing signal processing and event detection algorithms, an extension to Excel 2003 to import, visualize and processing sensor data, and interface to SQL server to archive and retrieve data, and a microserver interaction console miuSIC) for users to configure and control microservers. All software is implemented in C# under visual studio 2005 and .NET framework 2.0. Please refer to http://research.microsoft.com/nec/msrsense for more information.

Source: Microsoft Research Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit

SensorMap & Toolkit Tutorial

Dan Fay — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:00:00 GMT

There is SensorMap training available, hosted at the IPSN 2007 conference in Boston, MA, USA, on Saturday April 28, 2007. Details on the tutorial are here.

This tutorial includes a hands-on introduction and guide to the use and deployment of sensornet research tools from Microsoft Research (MSR): SensorMap and MSR Sense toolkit. SensorMap is a research portal that lets users visualize and query real-time sensornet data using a geographical interface such as Windows Live Local and allows data owners to easily publish their live data using a web service interface. The toolkit is a collection of software tools that allow users to collect, process, archive, and visualize data from a sensor network.

Source: IPSN Tutorial: Sensormap and Toolkit

Technology Review: The Year in Infotech and MSR SenseWeb

Dan Fay — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:44:13 GMT

It's great to see the MSR SenseWeb project picked as one of 2006 most significant advances in information technology by Technology Review. Check out the SensorMap and you can see the JHU Life Under Your Feet Project sensors on the map.

Geotagging. GPS is becoming a more common feature in mobile phones, cameras, and cars. The result is a world of people, pictures, cars, and data trails on maps. A Microsoft research project aggregates disparate sensor data to map the world in real time.

Source: Technology Review: The Year in Infotech