Calendar of Events - Event
Event Scheduled for Nov 2, 2012
Event: Colloquium: Michael Zink, Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA): Architecture, Design, Implementation, and Operation of Sensor/Actuator Networks for Severe Weather Observations
Location: ITE 336
Time: 01:00 pm
Details of Event:
Speaker: Michael Zink
Assistant Professor,Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Massachusetts in Amherst
Date: Nov 2, 2012
Time: 1pm – 2pm
Place: ITEB 336
Talk Title: Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA): Architecture, Design, Implementation, and Operation of Sensor/Actuator Networks for Severe Weather Observations
Abstract
CASA is a NSF funded Engineering Research Center that seeks to revolutionize our ability to observe, understand, predict, and respond to hazardous weather by creating distributed collaborative adaptive sensing (DCAS) networks that sample the atmosphere where and when end-user needs are greatest. This presentation will start with giving an overview of CASA’s DCAS system architecture. This includes the sensing nodes, the communication infrastructure, and the central node, which hosts the Meteorological Command & Control (MC&C) architecture. The MC&C is the heart of the DCAS system, which ingests data from the radars, identifies meteorological features in this data, and determines each radar’s scan strategy based on detected features and end-user requirements. Every 1-minute heartbeat the MC&C ingests processed sensor data to generate meteorological features, which might be of interest to the systems end-users. These features are then clustered together and posited as potential three-dimensional scanning tasks. Novel optimization techniques that consider the preferences of different end-user groups then determine the actual targeting of the radars. In addition to the system architecture, an overview on two CASA testbeds that are an instantiation of this architecture will be given. The first one is a 4-node testbed, which we operated for six years in southwestern Oklahoma. This testbed covered a region of 7000 square km that receives an average of four tornado warnings and 53 thunderstorm warnings a year. The second testbed is located on the island of Puerto Rico and consists of low-cost, off-the-grid radars with the intent to measure rainfall to better predict floods. Lessons learned from the design and implementation phase of the systems, and report on experiences made during operation of the testbeds will be presented. Finally, the presentation will provide an overview on new topics that are currently being investigated in CASA. These topics include the tracking of low-flying aircraft in addition to weather, the integration of infrasound sensors, the application of cloud computing for on demand execution of weather prediction algorithms, and the usage of ultra-high bandwidth links to transmit time-series radar data in real time.
Biography
Michael Zink is currently an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. As CASA's Deputy Director for Technical Integration he manages an interdisciplinary team of meteorologists, electrical engineers, social scientists and computer scientists. He works in the fields of sensor networks and distribution networks for high bandwidth data. Further research interests are in wide-area multimedia distribution for wired and wireless environments and network measurements. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. degree (Dr.-Ing.) from Darmstadt University of Technology, his thesis was on "Scalable Internet Video-on-Demand Systems".
Sponsored By: Computer Science and Engineering
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