Speaker 1

Dr. Alex Rogers

Lecturer

School of Electronics and Computer Science

University of Southampton

[email protected]

Information Agents for Improved Situational Awareness

Our goal is to develop intelligent software agents to support situational awareness

• Provide situational awareness support to first responders at the scene of a disaster Situational awareness is the PERCEPTION of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the COMPREHENSION of their meaning, and the PROJECTION of their status in t h e n e a r f u t u r e ( E n d s l e y 1 9 8 8 ) .

• Use sensor networks to perform this perception – Weather, temperature, visibility, noise, gas detection etc.

– Exploit sensors already in the environment.

– Allow easy deployment of additional sensors.

An information agent autonomously acquires and processes sensor data

• Handles noisy, missing, delayed sensor readings – Use a principled and explicit representation of uncertainty • Detects faulty or unreliable sensors – Open system with multiple stakeholders • Makes short term predictions based on past sensor readings – Without explicit physical models • Makes efficient use of limited local resources to acquire maximum information (active data selection) – Limited bandwidth, power or computational resources – Select between sensors and optimise sampling schedule

minimal domain knowledge > learning algorithms real-time > computationally efficient algorithms

Information processing as multi dimensional regression and prediction

We use Gaussian processes to perform principled Bayesian inference regarding the underlying environmental parameters based on data streams of sensor readings subject to:

missing readings correlations delays

We have validated our approach using a network of weather sensors

• Wireless weather sensors deployed in the Solent – Wind speed, direction, air temperature, air pressure, tide height etc – Samples every minute – Website for each sensor displaying data • Augmented these sensor websites with machine readable RDF markup – RDF is a key building block of the semantic web

Our information agent can predict missing readings when sensors fail

A web-based implementation of our information agent is available online www.aladdinproject.org/situation/

More details of our approach can be found in the following publications

Rogers, A., Osborne, M. A., Ramchurn, S., Roberts, S. J. and Jennings, N. R. (2008) Information Agents for Pervasive Sensor Networks. In: Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Networks and Systems for Pervasive Computing (PerComm 20008), pp 294-299, Hong Kong, China. Osborne, M. A., Rogers, A., Ramchurn, S., Roberts, S. J. and Jennings, N. R. (2008)

Towards Real-Time Information Processing of Sensor Network Data

using Computationally Efficient Multi-output Gaussian Processes. In: International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2008), pp 109-120, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Available online at: www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~acr/