Dr. Sharad Mehrotra and an interdisciplinary team of collaborators at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) will develop I-sensorium, to serve as a "living laboratory" to support research in several related areas of cyber-physical systems: including theoretical foundations and underlying principles of building sentient systems; engineering, software, and systems level challenges; and novel application contexts where such sentient systems can be used. I-Sensorium will serve as a testbed for exploring and testing novel sentient technologies. I-Sensorium augments Responsphere, an existing UCI crisis response test-bed with state-of-the-art storage and computational infrastructure to acquire and process continuous streams of sensory data from Responsphere sensors. The I-Sensorium software will leverage multiple ongoing research projects at UCI on large-scale, heterogeneous sensor databases, sensor middleware platforms for querying and analysis of heterogeneous sensor data, and an event representation system for multi-media data, to provide a high level programming environment for the I-Sensorium allowing a broad group of researchers to participate and benefit from its creation.
The development of I-Sensorium offers opportunities for research-based education and training in many aspects of cyber-physical systems. The infrastructure as well as the sensor data acquisition enabled by it presents research challenges and opportunities in sensor data management, machine learning, computer vision, event modeling, among others. Interactions with industrial partners and government agencies are expected to lead to advances in the applications of cyber-physical systems in real-world settings. Education and outreach efforts are aimed at broadening the participation of women and members of underrepresented groups in computer science and engineering. Further information about this project can be found at: www.i-sensorium.org
