[agents] Agent Technology for Sensor Networks - Final CFP ATSN'08

[Luke Teacy]

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         Call For Participation:  Second International Workshop on

          Agent Technology for Sensor Networks


            To be held in conjunction with the
Seventh Internationl Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems
                    (AAMAS 2008)

                      13th May 2008
                http://www.atsn08.org

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Sensor networks are increasingly seen as a solution to the problem of  
performing wide-area monitoring and surveillance within environmental,  
security and military scenarios. Such networks consist of multiple  
sensors, deployed over a wide area, connected through a communication  
network (wired or otherwise). To ensure minimal human intervention the  
sensors within these networks should be able to self-organise,  
autonomously manage their own resources, and co-ordinate their  
behaviour to achieve system wide goals. The distributed nature of  
these networks, and the autonomous behaviour expected of them,  
naturally lend themselves to a multi-agent methodology, and many of  
the technical challenges posed by these systems (e.g. decentralised  
control, co-ordination, resource allocation) form the basis of main- 
stream research within the agent community. However, such systems pose  
many additional challenges, not least how to manage limited  
computation and energy resources, constrained communication, and  
unreliable or fault prone network components within a dynamic and  
uncertain environment.

Furthermore, the increasing availability of sensor network data, and  
the need to make use of it in real-time for informed decision making,  
requires the development of intelligent agents that can autonomously  
acquire data from these networks, and perform information processing  
tasks such as fusion, inference and prediction.

Thus, the goals of this workshop are to explore the use of agent  
technologies, both within the networks themselves (where agents  
represent the actual sensors), and also for the collection and  
processing of sensor network data. As such, topics of interest include:

- Agent based management of sensor networks
- Novel paradigms for sensor network management (e.g. game theoretic  
and market-oriented programming approaches).
- Co-ordination and planning
- Adaptive and learning agents for sensor networks
- Energy and resource aware sensor networks
- Emergent behaviour
- Computational issues
- Data fusion and aggregation within sensor networks
- Reasoning with incomplete or uncertain information
- Security and trust in sensor networks
- Applications and real-world deployments of sensor networks
- Agent-based architectures for sensor networks
- Agent-based simulation of sensor networks
- Reliability, efficiency, and fault tolerance

Keynote Speaker
---------------

Prof. Giuseppe Anastasi of the University of Pisa, Italy (http://info.iet.unipi.it/~anastasi/ 
) will be presenting  a keynote talk titled 'Energy management in  
emerging practical wireless sensor networks'.

Abstract:

In last years Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have received a growing  
interest from the research community. Special attention has been  
devoted to the energy conservation problem since sensor nodes have a  
limited energy budget. Recently, WSNs have ceased to be an interesting  
research topic only, and have become a more and more widespread  
commercially available technology.

Real sensor network deployments have pointed out a number of aspects  
which had been neglected, or not considered enough, in previous  
studies. One of the most widely adopted assumptions about sensor  
networks is that the energy consumed by the radio for data  
transmissions is much higher than that needed by the sensors for data  
acquisition or the CPU for local data processing. On the basis of this  
assumption many solutions have been proposed in order to reduce,  
either directly or indirectly, the energy consumption of the radio. In  
many practical applications, however, the energy expenditure for data  
sensing may be comparable to, or even greater than, the energy needed  
for data transmissions. As a consequence, solutions aiming at reducing  
the energy expenditure of the radio only are not suitable to this  
context. They need to be complemented with techniques aimed at  
reducing the sensor's energy consumption as well.

In this talk, the main approaches to sensor's energy management will  
be surveyed. In addition, a general methodology for adaptive sampling  
will be presented. It is mainly based on an Adaptive Sampling  
Algorithm that dynamically estimates the optimal sampling rate (i.e.,  
the minimal sampling rate guaranteeing an accurate acquisition) by  
exploiting the current features of the signals under monitoring. This  
not only reduces the sensor activity. By decreasing the sampling rate,  
the algorithm also reduces the amount of data to be transmitted and,  
hence, the energy consumed for data transmission. This methodology has  
been conceived for a specific WSN application (real time monitoring of  
the snow composition in a mountain slope to foresee possible snow  
avalanches). However, it can be applied – possibly with minor  
adaptations – to many other applications requiring high/medium medium/ 
high energy eager sensors