Sensors are
considered the last missing link between the Internet and the
physical world. A sensor network forms a loosely-coupled distributed
environment where collaborative processing among multiple sensor nodes
is essential in order to compensate for each other's limited capability
in sensing, processing, power supply, and to tolerate faults. The
extremely constraint resources of sensor networks have presented unique
challenges to collaborative processing, the biggest of which is the
contradictory requirements between energy efficiency and fault
tolerance. While energy-efficient approaches try to limit the
redundancy such that minimum amount of energy is required for
fulfilling a certain task, redundancy is needed for providing fault
tolerance since sensors might be faulty, malfunctioning, or even
malicious. A balance has to be struck between these two objectives.
This talk discusses an integrated system design that tackles the unique
challenges presented by sensor networks. This design concerns not only
the development of effective processing algorithms, it also studies
supporting computing paradigms and protocols which play an important
role in facilitating the collaborative processing.
Biography
Hairong Qi
received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina
State University (NCSU) in 1999, B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer
Science from Northern JiaoTong University, Beijing, P. R. China in 1992
and 1995 respectively. She is now an Associate Professor in the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University
of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her current research project are in the
areas of collaborative signal and information processing in sensor
networks, hyperspectral image analysis, and automatic target
recognition. Dr. Qi's research is supported by NSF, DARPA, ONR, U.S.
Army Space and Missile Defense Command, and U.S. Army Medical Research
and Materiel Command.
Dr. Qi
received the Science Alliance Faculty Award from UT and Oak Ridge
National Lab in 2001, the Leon and Nancy Cole Superior Teaching Award
from UT College of Engineering in 2003, the Chancellor's Award for
Professional Promise in Research and Creative Achievement in 2004, and
the NSF CAREER award in 2005. She has published over 60 technical
papers in archival journals and refereed conference proceedings,
including a co-authored book in Machine Vision. Dr. Qi serves on the
editorial board of Sensor Letters and is the Associate Editor for
Computers in Biology and Medicine. She co-edited a special issue on
Distributed Sensor Networks for Real-Time Systems with Adaptive
Reconfiguration of Journal of Franklin Institute. Dr. Qi is a senior
member of IEEE and member of Sigma Xi and AAAI.