Projects > CENS & CENSEI, 2002 -

The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing is a U.S. National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center based at UCLA that includes dozens of cooperating scientists, technologists, educators, and teachers (middle school and high school). CENS is a large, multidisciplinary research collaboration among multiple universities.The Center was launched in August, 2002, with funding to 2007, and renewable 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. 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. 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 and educational applications. Computer scientists, engineers, and scientists (e.g., biology, geology, seismology, environmental sciences, marine sciences) 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.

Our scope in CENS includes design of infrastructure for managing scientific data, design of tools to make data useful for educational applications, and guidance on policy for sharing data. The content in CENS consists of real-time data generated by scientific research projects, rather than resources already collected into a digital library. The effort on this project was accelerated by an additional grant from the National Science Foundation specifically for data management and educational research (Sandoval & Borgman, 2004-2008).

Recent Projects

CENS Deployment Center - http://censdc.cens.ucla.edu/

CENS eScholarship Repository - http://repositories.cdlib.org/cens

Recent Publications

Mayernik, M.S., Wallis, J.C., Borgman, C.L., Pepe, A. (in press). Addng Context to Content: The CENS Deployment Center. Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. [pdf]

Wallis, J.C., Borgman, C.L., Mayernik, M.S., Pepe, A. (in press). Know thy sensor: Trust, data quality, and data integrity in scientific digital libraries. European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 2007, Budapest, Hungary. [pdf]

Pepe, A., Borgman, C.L., Wallis, J.C., Mayernik, M.S. (in press). Knitting a fabric of sensor data resources. ACM/IEEE Information Processing in Sensor Networks Workshop on Data Sharing & Interoperability, Cambridge, MA. [pdf]

Borgman, C.L., Wallis, J.C., Mayernik, M.S., Pepe, A. (2007). Drowning in data: Digital library architecture to support scientistific use of embedded sensor networks. ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2007, Vancouver, BC. [pdf]

Borgman, C.L., Wallis, J.C., Enyedy, N. (in print). Little science confronts the data deluge: Habitat ecology, embedded sensor networks, and digital libraries. International Journal on Digital Libraries. [pdf]

Wallis, J.C., Milojevic, S., Borgman, C.L. & Sandoval, W.A. (2006). The special case of scientific data sharing with education. Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 2006, Austin, TX. [link] [pdf] [ppt]

Borgman, C.L., Wallis, J.C., Enyedy, N. (2006). Building digital libraries for scientific data: An exploratory study of data pratices in habitat ecology. European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 2006, Alicante, Spain. [pdf] [ppt]

Borgman, C.L. (2006). What can studies of e-Learning teach us about e-Research? Some findings from digital library research. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. [pdf]

Shankar, K. (2003). Scientific data archiving: the state of the art in information, data, and metadata management. [pdf]

Recent Presentations

Christine L. Borgman (2007) Internet Search and Scientific Information Practices. 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, CA. [ppt]

Christine L. Borgman (2007) International and Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Cyberinfrastructure: A case study with embedded networked sensor technology. 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, CA. [ppt]

Christine L. Borgman (2006) Personal Digital Libraries and Scientific Data. Annual Society for Information Science & Technology Annual Meeting 2006, Austin, TX. Panel on Personal Digital Collections. [ppt]

Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman, Noel Enyedy, & Matthew Mayernik (2006) CENS: A Test-bed for the Study of Scientific Data Management. American Society for Information Science & Technology 2006, Austin, TX. Panel on Managing Scientific Data for Long-term Access and Use. [ppt]

Christine L. Borgman, Jillian C. Wallis, Noel Enyedy, & Matthew Mayernik (2006) Capturing Habitat Ecology in Reusable Forms. Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science 2006, Vancouver, Canada. [ppt]

Borgman, C.L., Wallis, J.C. & Enyedy, N. (2006). Building Digital Libraries for Scientific Data: An exploratory study of data practices in habitat ecology.European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 2006, Alicante, Spain. [pdf] [ppt]

Borgman, C. L. (2005). Disciplinary Differences in E-Research: An information Perspective. Keynote Talk. First International Conference on e-Social Science, Manchester, UK, Manchester, UK. National Center for e-Social Science. [link]

Borgman, C. L. (2005). The Social Embeddness of Embedded Networked Sensing. MIT-OII Workshop on New Approaches to Research on the Social Implications of Emerging Technologies, University of Oxford, University of Oxford. Oxford Internet Institute. [link] [pdf]

Borgman, C. L. (2004). The Interaction of Community and Individual Practices in the Design of a Digital Library. International Symposium on Digital Libraries and Knowledge Communities in Networked Information Society, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. [link]

Acknowledgements

The data management and education research in CENS is conducted in collaboration with Jillian C. Wallis of CENS and three faculty members of the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies: William A. Sandoval and Noel Enyedy, both of the Department of Education, and Jonathan Furner of the Department of Information Studies who participated in 2004-2005. Students and post-doctoral fellows who have participated on the data management team since 2002 are Kalpana Shankar, Eun Park, Stasa Milojevic, Jillian Wallis, and Matthew Mayernik. Participation of Alberto Pepe, Ph.D. student in Information Studies, on the data management research team for 2006-2008 is funded by a gift from Microsoft Technical Computing. CENS is funded by National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement #CCR-0120778, Deborah L. Estrin, UCLA, Principal Investigator; Christine L. Borgman is a co-Principal Investigator. Further research on data management described here is funded by NSF award number ESI-0352572, William A. Sandoval, Principal Investigator; Christine L. Borgman, co-Principal Investigator. We have enjoyed the extensive contributions to our work made by members of the education team, including (during the period covered in these papers) Sara Terheggen, Karen Kim, Joe Wise, Kathy Griffis, Andy Wu, Kelli Millwood, and Jeff Bockert.