This award is made to the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to hold a workshop in the area of sensor technologies together with the Irish counterpart of the National Science Foundation. The focus is not as much on sensor networks, but more on how lower level circuits and device technology including emerging bio-nano sensor technologies can have a possible impact. Various application areas e.g., from civil infrastructure to bio-sensing will be examined, with primary focus on circuits and device technologies. Various relevant industry constituents, both from the US and Europe, are going to be invited to this workshop, but for obvious reasons only the US participants will be able to receive benefits of NSF support.
The potential broader impact of the outcome of the workshop, albeit of somewhat technical nature, is expectedly very large. One of the several goals is to explore new technologies that may lead to small businesses and startups. In this vein, the several US academic participants with experience with startup technologies are being invited as well. In the long run sensors may benefit the educational arena as well via adoption of sensor technology in new courses and university curriculum, but the present proposal does not plan to be engaged in such activities.
Sensors and connected systems of sensors have the primary function of providing increased human awareness of the states of the environment, of human health and safety, and of the systems designed to serve humankind. In all cases, it is important that sensors and systems of sensors provide accurate, timely, and trusted data for information extraction to support decision processes. In some cases, it is possible to construct autonomic systems that act without human intervention in a corrective manner to undesired deviations in the sensed data. Sensors and sensor systems are proliferating throughout society, often along the lines of niche applications. Because of their fundamental importance, it is very important that the costs of producing and installing sensors and their networks be continuously reduced. One inspiration for cost reduction is in the domain of information processing where the cost-per-instruction/second has decreased exponentially for about thirty years. This remarkable progress has been enabled by the continued progress in integrated circuit technology to provide rapidly increasing complexity for design coupled with large scale manufacturing of a single processor design to enable many information processing applications. Can there be a programmable parallel for sensor technology, given the broad array of physical domains across which sensors must operate? Looking beyond individual sensors, systems of interconnected sensors are contributing to the proliferation of vast quantities of data from which information must be extracted for use in decision-making; often with real-time requirements. The payoff for the successful implementation of these ‘big-data’ information systems is believed to be huge in terms of resource conservation, safety and security of members of society, and the enablement of collective collaboration. The phrase ‘smart cities’ is often used as a descriptor for the benefits of integrated sensor systems that can promise major benefits to society. These topics were explored by leading researchers from industry, academia, and governments at the NSF/SFI/SRC Forum on Integrated Sensors for Cybersystems (FISC) that was held in Maynooth Ireland on March 22 and 23, 2012. (www.src.org/calendar/e004576/) Professor Martin Curley, Director of Intel Labs, Europe gave the keynote address for the Forum [1] in which he considered three emerging mega-trends; Mass Collaboration, Digital Transformations, and Sustainability. With respect to Digital Transformations, the impact of Moore’s Law on information processing is so significant that computing is becoming pervasive in society as indicated by a projected 15 billion connected devices by 2015. There is also emerging embedded ambient intelligence capability that is context-aware, personalized, adaptive, and that anticipates services required by its user. Professor Curley indicated that while there is an emphasis on highly energy-efficient information processing technologies, the real gains toward sustainability are likely to be derived from applications of information technology to managing and reducing resource utilization. He noted that there appears to be a trend in information processing from a focus on automation of systems, to substitution (i.e. electronic as opposed to physical meetings) to de-materialization (i.e. electronic financial transactions). Although not a primary emphasis of the Forum, it is generally acknowledged that cyber security is an essential dimension of cyber-physical systems. In [2], Professor Fred Schneider of Cornell University offered an interesting perspective on a potential doctrine for cyber security based on analogies with the systems developed by society for public health. In general, public health doctrine centers on the ideas of public education, the creation and use of methods for prevention and treatment of specific diseases, and identification and management of disease and infected individuals through surveillance, information gathering, and analysis. These ideas may provide a framework from which to manage the problems arising in cyber security. It has been projected that the structure of systems needed to support the overarching concept of smart cities can be described at several levels beginning with the sensor/actuator layer, the component layer, the system architecture layer, the smart mobility layer, and ultimately, the smart cities layer. FISC was organized into sessions reflecting this taxonomy to identify some of the basic research needs across these layers.
