Title: Robust and Resource-Efficient Sensing for Real World Applications
Speaker: Nirupama Bulusu, Portland State University

Abstract:
Animal calls, street signs, car honks, salinity gradients etc. The
physical world is permeated with objects and phenomena that can be
captured, digitized and analyzed in the era of networked sensing,
using low-power networked embedded systems, or crowdsourced sensing systems
that leverage mobile phones, or large scale geospatial sensing systems.
Across these systems, a recurring challenge is to accurately detect, track
or reconstruct complex phenomena under severe resource or deployment
constraints, and under noisy and unpredictable physical world conditions.

In this talk, I will present the design and implementation of detection,
tracking and reconstruction systems for several real world applications:
rapidly detecting invasive cane toad species in the Kakadu National
Park of Australia; tracking fuel price dispersion and noise pollution in
cities; and tracking highly dynamic salinity intrusion in the Columbia
River estuary in Oregon. I will explore key design elements that enable
robust and resource-efficient sensing across these applications, such
as adaptive sampling in time and space, compressed sensing, lightweight
feature extraction, multi-scale information processing models, and
heterogeneous system architectures.

This talk describes joint work with student and faculty colleagues at
Portland State University, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and
the University of New South Wales.

Bio:
Nirupama Bulusu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at
Portland State University. She received the B.Tech degree from the Indian
Institute of Technology, Madras in 1997 and the Ph.D degree
from the University of California Los Angeles in 2002, both in
computer science. Her research interests lie in sensor networks, with an
emphasis on environmental and urban sensing applications. She is a
recipient of the NSF CAREER award.