Project:
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS)
The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing is a U.S. National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center based at UCLA that includes more than 300 participating faculty, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, educators, and teachers (middle school and high school). CENS is a large, multidisciplinary research collaboration among five universities: UCLA, University of Southern California, UC-Riverside, Caltech, UC-Merced. The Center was launched in August, 2002, with funding to 2007. Funding for CENS was renewed for five years, from 2007 to 2012. CENS investigators manage many additional grant projects through the Center.
CENS is developing embedded networked sensing systems and applying this technology to scientific applications and to a growing array of public interest projects. Most of these are large-scale, distributed, systems composed of smart sensors and actuators embedded in the physical world. They monitor and collect information on such diverse subjects as plankton colonies, bird behavior, plant growth, contaminants in soil and water, and structural integrity of buildings, bridges, and other human-made structures. Newer projects also deploy cell phones for health, safety, and environmental sensing in urban areas. A central goal of embedded networked sensing systems is the ability to reveal previously unobservable phenomena. The researchers in CENS are investigating fundamental properties of these systems, developing new enabling technologies, and exploring novel scientific, social, and educational applications. Computer scientists, engineers, and scientists (e.g., biology, geology, seismology, environmental sciences, marine sciences, information studies) from multiple universities are collaborating to design and deploy these systems. As the Center has evolved, scholars in related fields have joined our projects, including participating faculty from statistics, law, architecture, design, and film.
I lead the Data Practices team in CENS. Our research addresses the life cycle of data, from origins to curation, and all of the systems and behaviors along the way. We study work practices, collaborative activity, and the design of tools, systems, and services to manage, share, use, and reuse data and other scholarly products. Activities are divided across an array of projects, described individually below, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and by gifts from the Microsoft Technical Computing Initiative.
CENS publications are loaded periodically into the CENS eScholarship repository. Publications, posters, presentations and other material associated with individual projects are listed in the CENS section of the Selected Works site.
Funding: CENS: National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement #CCR-0120778, Deborah L. Estrin, UCLA, Principle Investigator
CENS Education Infrastructure (CENSEI)
CENS Deployment Center (CENS DC)
Towards a Virtual Organization for Data Cyberinfrastructure (SGER)
Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory
Object Reuse and Exchange; RDF data modeling
Handheld application for mobile data collection in the field
Structure and evolution of scientific collaboration networks in little science research