SmartGeo: Toward the Development of Intelligent Geosystems

The Faculty of Informatics (USI) and the Networking Laboratory (SUPSI) are pleased to announce a seminar given by Tracy Camp

DATE: Thursday, April 25th 2013
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-006, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 09.30

ABSTRACT:
Much of our world's subsurface is contaminated, due to legacy mining and milling sites; without treatment, the earth's water supply is at risk. Imagine a remediation system that monitors a contaminated subsurface weekly, intelligently determines its status, and autonomously reacts to immobilize the contamination and protect our water supply.

Earthen dams are critical components in our world's water resource infrastructure, but many are at or near their intended design life.  Imagine an earthen dam that monitors itself daily, detects early onset of internal erosion, and takes action to avoid a catastrophic failure.

The goal of the SmartGeo program at the Colorado School of Mines is to turn these imaginations into reality.  We are working to develop intelligent geosystems, in order to enable engineered and natural earth structures and environments to (1) sense their environment and (2) adapt to improve performance.

We work in conjunction with geophysicists and environmental engineers in order to connect these geosystems with our digital world through wireless sensor networks. To enable cost effective geophysical monitoring through wireless sensing, we developed a new wireless hardware platform called gsMote (geophysical signal mote). To enable accurate post-processing of geophysical data, we developed a new localization protocol to obtain precise mote locations. To reduce the energy requirements of the network, we are investigating whether compressive sensing techniques are effective with our geophysical data. In this presentation, I will discuss the motivation for our SmartGeo program, the progress we have made thus far, and the challenges that still exist to reach our goal of intelligent geosystems.

BIO:
Tracy Camp is a Full Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines. She is the Founder and Director of the Toilers (http://toilers.mines.edu), an active ad hoc networks research group. Her current research interests include the credibility of ad hoc network simulation studies and the use of wireless sensor networks in geosystems. Dr. Camp has received over 20 grants from the National Science Foundation, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award. In total, her projects have received over $20 million dollars in external funding. This funding has produced 12 software packages that have been requested from (and shared with) more than 3000 researchers in 86 countries (as of October 2012). Dr. Camp has published over 80 refereed articles and 12 invited articles, and these articles have been cited almost 4,000 times (per Microsoft Academic Search) and over 7,000 times (per Google Scholar) as of December 2012. As of December 2012, Dr. Camp's h-index (Hirsch number) is 23 (per Google Scholar); in other words, according to Google Scholar, Dr. Camp has at least 23 articles with 23 or more citations.

Dr. Camp is an ACM Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Lecturer, and an IEEE Senior Member. She has enjoyed being a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand (in 2006), a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Bonn in Germany (in 2010), and a keynote presenter at several venues, e.g., at the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2011) in Adelaide, Australia, and the 3rd International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools 2010) in Malaga, Spain. In December 2007, Dr. Camp received the Board of Trustees Outstanding Faculty Award at the Colorado School of Mines; this award was only given five times between 1998-2007.

Dr. Camp currently co-chairs the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). CRA-W is "an action oriented organization dedicated to increasing the number of women participating in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) research and education at all levels". In her role as Co-Chair, Dr. Camp co-leads the CRA-W's Steering Committee. Dr. Camp was also the elected Treasurer of ACM's Special Interest Group on Mobile Computing (SIGMOBILE) from 2005-2009. She served as the co-chair of ACM's Committee on Women in Computing from 1998-2002. She was honored to be the General Chair of the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Dr. Camp shares her life with Max (born in 2000), Emma (born in 2003), her husband (Glen), and three pets (two cats and a dog). The four humans are vegetarians who tremendously enjoy living in the foothills of the Rockies.

HOST: Dr. Anna Förster