This action adds the University of Virginia as a research site to the existing multi-university Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Wireless Internet Advanced Technology. The research site will augment the Center's research agenda with resource management tradeoffs in wireless sensor networks, resource management for reconfigurable wireless sensor networks, infrastructure for persistent surveillance of a metropolitan region and vehicle infrastructure integration.
The University of Virginia Site (UVa) for the Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology has been a very successful program since it was first awarded in 2006. A wide variety of basic research projects have been undertaken under the IU/CRC Center at the UVa site that has led to technological and methodological innovations - leading to additional grants that provided new research opportunities for faculty participating in the program and supporting graduate and doctoral candidates throughout the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences while also providing value back to our industry member organizations. The UVA WICAT site also provided research experiences for undergraduate students through Capstone projects which are performed throughout their senior years, as well as directly on graduate research teams. The work performed within this Center has led to numerous Master's and PhD student’s dissertations and theses. The Center has directly fostered the publication of numerous conference papers, conference presentations and journal publications over the life of the program. We engaged many different industry partners over the life of the UVa WICAT site including organizations such as Accenture, MITRE, Lockheed Martin, EOIR Technologies, Center for Advanced Engineering and Research (CAER), SAIC, NRO, Sun, AGI, Areva, Cisco, VTRC, and General Electric. These partnerships, and the contributions they made toward providing real-world influences on the projects at both graduate and undergraduate levels, were vital to the research projects which were performed under the WICAT umbrella. These collaborative research efforts provided the foundation for activities at the UVA WICAT site, with the support of our industry members, as well as provided additional value to the WICAT, across the member universities in the WICAT Center as a whole. Research efforts in WICAT have investigated a wide variety of topic areas over the life of the program in both commercial and governmental environments. These include investigations of a wide array of different areas in wireless technologies, both functional and technical, where wireless sensors have proliferated and how those sensors and the data they provide can be optimized over wireless networks. Various power and signal management strategies were investigated that would maximize the use of the available wireless spectrum bandwidth. Novel approaches for sharing that wireless spectrum and allocating the available resources to users of the spectrum were also investigated. Research efforts also focused on the effective allocation of limited bandwidth in wireless systems such as investigating the development an agile architecture and new algorithms for adapting encoding parameters for video content over constrained wireless channels. We also investigated the use of various sensors and algorithms to detect and to identify and track objects. We also investigated the use of wireless sensors including application areas such as medicine where we investigated ideas of utilizing wireless sensors and networks to remotely monitor patients in different medical environments. This included investigating the wireless challenges of applications for situations such as patient gait analysis and the tracking of diabetic patients and their insulin levels which also led to advancements in treatment methods for patients with diabetes and in collecting the data need for that treatment. Projects under WICAT have also looked at different ways to use a wireless platform of sensors to provide the base data needed for machine learning algorithms to look at the use automated, deterministic algorithms to determine worker and other human activities. This included use of standard technologies such as RGB video, but extended into investigating the use of new low cost, high data producing sensors such depth sensing cameras (like the Microsoft Kinect) in environments such as factories and classrooms and the impacts of using these types of sensors has in a wireless network environment.
