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Special Sessions

The SAS 2015 Committee is soliciting Special Session proposals. Special Sessions stimulate an in-depth discussion in niche areas.The approved Special Sessions for IEEE SAS 2015 are as follows:

Sensor clouds: Power management and Low power design

Sensors and Algorithms for Resource-Constrained Agricultural WSNs

Sensors applications in power generation

Near Fields in Smart Transducers

Internet of Things (IoT)

Multiparametric sensors in biomedicine

Sensors and Sensing in Marine Robotics

Title: Sensor clouds: Power management and Low power design

Organizer: Michele Magno, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland

Short description:
Sensors have many applications ranging from environmental monitoring, security management, and medical applications to smart homes. In addition to new technologies, interfaces, high-traffic high-speed multimedia ubiquitous communications, self-deployment/self-organizing behavior, low electromagnetic radiation, scalability and flexibility, efficiency and power management of sensor and cloud of sensors is facing new challenges in research.This session emphasizes the challenges, issues, and opportunities in the research, design and engineering of power management techniques and strategies, such as adaptive duty cycling, wake up radio, heterogeneous sensors clouds and low power interfaces, energy-harvesting and energy-neutral sensing systems, topology of deployment, in order to reduce the overall power consumption and extended the lifetime of the whole cloud or of the single sensor and minimize the impact of the wasteful and inefficient activities. The aim of this session is to attract researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in order to provide a discussion environment for sharing their experiences of using advanced power management techniques for addressing the challenges in the area of sensors and sensors cloud.

Submissions are welcome on technologies and applications for power management, energy efficiency and low power design of sensor clouds, for example:

  • Power management algorithms for sensors network 
  • Power-aware and energy-efficient design
  • Power sources and energy neutrality in sensor clouds
  • Low power design of and architecture of sensor node and network
  • Approaches to enable interoperability between energy efficient networks 
  • Modelling, simulation and tools for effective design of energy efficient and low power systems 
  • Distributed energy efficient networked sensing
  • Low power Architectures and standards 
  • Low power Internet of things
  • Energy efficient MAC protocols and strategies
  • Passive or ultra low power wake up radio
  • Wireless/wired communication techniques for sensor clouds
  • Applications of low power sensors clouds.

Title: Sensors and Algorithms for Resource-Constrained Agricultural WSNs

Organizers: Dr Nick Harris ([email protected]) and Dr Geoff Merrett ([email protected]), University of Southampton

Short Description:
By 2050, the global population is estimated to have reached 9 billion and the challenge of feeding these people will be significant. To meet this increased demand, it is envisaged that the amount of food produced must double. To deliver this, new efficient approaches are needed to monitor and manage crop production. The use of technology will be pivotal in realising this massive intensification of food production without having a disastrous effect on soil, water and habitat. Recent and continuous advancements in WSN technology have considerable promise. This special session invites papers that can contribute to the advancement of WSNs and distributed sensors in agricultural applications. This includes, but is not limited to, the topics below.

Topics:

  • Novel sensor design
  • WSN applications in agriculture, hydrology and waste-water
  • Application-specific communication strategies
  • Approaches for collaboration between WSNs
  • Catchment- and Multi-Scale monitoring
  • Novel WSN platforms
  • Case studies and real-world deployment experiences

Title: Sensors applications in power generation

Organizer: Dr. Ante Elez,  KONČAR – Electrical Engineering Institute Inc., Zagreb, Croatia

Short Description:
Electric power system is a backbone of contemporary technical civilization and today’s economy. Functioning is not possible without stable, uninterruptable supply of electric energy that is needed both in industry and in most areas of our private lives. According to its importance, electric power system has to be maintained, controlled and protected against possible faults and other abnormal phenomena. The most important parts of every electric power system are electrical rotating machines, transformers and switching equipment, especially those involved in the production of electrical energy. Constant increase of the reliability and availability of such key equipment is of highest importance. Also, the current practice is to extend periods between planned outages of the equipment. Any malfunctions and unnecessary and unplanned outages can cause extensive material damage. The way to alleviate or even prevent such events is implementation of various measuring sensors as information providers for monitoring systems.

Topics:

  • Sensors and rotating machines
  • Sensors and high/medium voltage equipment
  • Sensors and power transformers
  • Advances in Monitoring of key equipment in power generation plants
  • Advanced methods of diagnostic in power plants

Title: Near Fields in Smart Transducers

Organizer:  Hubert Zangl, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfur, Austria

Short Description:
Near fields, i.e. fields where either the electric or the magnetic field is dominant, find many applications in modern smart transducers. Besides sensing, near fields are also used in smart transducers in energy harvesting as well as in communication. Like electromagnetic waves, near fields allow for non-contact devices but the fact that near fields emphasize certain properties of materials (conductivity, permittivity, permeability) they frequently offer advantages. The used frequency ranges start at DC and nowadays extend up into the GHz domain, which leads to challenges in modelling, simulation and design. Although the use of near fields is quite different in the three domains sensing, harvesting and communication, similar problems are encountered, e.g. simulation accuracy, low power/low noise electronic circuitry design and electromagnetic compatibility issues. Therefore, this special sessions aims to bring together experts working with near fields to share their experience.

We encourage submissions on:

  • near field sensing and actuation
  • near field communication
  • near field energy harvesting
  • near fields and electromagnetic compatibility
  • measurement of permittivity, permeability and conductivity
  • Applications of near fields, e.g.
    • electric, magnetic and impedance tomography
    • home automation
    • condition monitoring
    • transportation
    • wireless sensor networks
    • precision position measurement
    • non-destructive testing
    • etc.
 
Title: Internet of Things (IoT)
 
Organizer: Dr. Tamás Dabóczi, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
 
Short Description:  Internet of Things is the interconnection of embedded computing devices, which have close interconnection with the physical world through their sensors and actuators. The high speed interconnection possibility (internet, Bluetooth, etc.) of these devices opens new perspectives in cooperation, like information fusion from several resources, distributed processing, cooperating actions, remote supervision and assistance etc. The challenge to build such systems is manifold: providing interoperability, composability, providing real-time behavior through an internet infrastructure without real-time guarantees, organizing the knowledge acquired from several resources etc. The special session aims to collect solutions in this application area, with special emphasis on the following topics:
 
Topics covered:
 
  • sensor systems for IoT
  • sensor web, ontology
  • sensor fusion
  • interconnection of embedded systems
  • distributed processing in IoT 
  • real-time behavior in IoT
  • diagnosis of IoT systems
  • reconfigurable architectures in IoT
  • energy harvesting in sensor systems
 
Title: Multiparametric sensors in biomedicine
 
Organizer: Prof. Eugenijus Kaniusas, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
 
Short description:
The comfort of a single sensor in combination with the derivation of multiple biological or physiological parameters comprises mutiparametric sensors. Multiparametric monitoring of diverse physiological data provides a basis for point-of-care systems in diagnosis and biofeedback-guided therapy, which, ideally, should be unobtrusive, reliable, resource-efficient, and personalised. In order to realize multiparametric sensors, a concerted effort is taken on the part of sensor-based measures and processing-based measures. These include novel sensor concepts with hybrid biosignals and novel regions of sensor application. Efforts involve a targeted use of mutual interrelations of biosignals and use of clinical correlations of diverse physiological parameters to derive, as well as the use of integrated pre-knowledge and advanced signal processing methods.
 
Topics of interest:
 
  • Diagnostic devices based on multiparametric sensing
  • Therapeutic devices based on multiparametric sensing
  • Biofeedback-based biomedical systems
  • Algorithms for multiparametric sensing in biology and medicine
  • Hardware and software for efficient multiparametric sensing

Title: Sensors and Sensing in Marine Robotics

Organizer: Dr. Nikola Mišković, University of Zagreb

Short description:
Marine robotics today present a challenging and intriguing research field where engineering and science experts have employed numerous resources to tackle with emerging problems. From the low level control problems, where dealing with coupled dynamics and hydrodynamics effects, across the mid level control problems, where environmental disturbances present a significant problem in guidance and path following, all the way to the high level control problems such as mission planning, research activities have achieved beyond state of the art progress. These findings are not only applicable in marine robotics, but other areas of robotics also.

In addition to that, marine robotics experience great problems related to communication and navigation which are almost taken for granted in ground applications. Classical communication and navigation systems do not function underwater due to the nature of propagation of electromagnetic waves. This is why acoustic communications present a state-of-the-art methodology applied in the underwater. Numerous problems arise as a consequence of the acoustic waves, and these issues are dealt with in a number of ways.

This special session will be devoted to presenting solutions to different problems that occur while operating in the underwater environment. Special attention will be given to application of different sensors and their integration to remotely operated and autonomous underwater and surface marine vehicles.