A 2005 research paper co-authored by
Prof. Al Hero, R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering,
Neal Patwari (PhD EE:Systems '05), and colleagues, addressing the problem of
localization in wireless sensor networks has been selected by the IEEE
Signal Processing Society (SPS) to receive the prestigious 2009
IEEE Signal
Processing Magazine Best Paper Award. Hero will receive the award during the
2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing (ICASSP 2010), March 14-19, 2010 in Dallas, TX.
This award honors the authors of a paper deemed to be of exceptional merit
and broad interest on a subject related to the Society's technical scope,
and appearing in the Society's magazine.
The article, "Locating the nodes: cooperative localization in wireless
sensor networks"1, addresses the importance of knowing where
networks of sensors are located once they've been deployed. Advances in RF
and MEMS IC design have made possible the use of large networks of wireless
sensors for a variety of monitoring and control applications, such as
building and bridge sensors; agriculture; equipment maintenance; traffic
monitoring systems; and environmental monitoring of air, water, and soil.
The use of sensor networks for these applications is only viable with
low-cost sensors that can last for years or even decades without battery
replacement, and with a network that can be organized without significant
human moderation. Also critical is the need to know where the sensors are
located.
This paper provided a window into cooperative localization using
localization algorithms, which must be designed to achieve low bias and low
variance, while at the same time be scalable to very large network sizes
without dramatically increasing energy or computational requirements.
This work, begun while Patwari was a doctoral student at Michigan, was the
basis for Neal's recent work at the University of Utah, where he is an
assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering. Patwari and his students demonstrated a novel system for
performing through-the-wall tomography with an ad-hoc network of cellphones
serving as the probe. This work was featured in a recent issue of the
MIT
Technology Review.
Prof. Hero's current research interests include inference in sensor networks,
adaptive sensing, bioinformatics, inverse problems, and statistical signal
and image processing. He holds joint appointments in the Department of
Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics, and during the
summer holds an appointment as
Digiteo Chaire d'Excellence at the Digiteo Research Park in Information
Science and Technology, Paris, France. He is also affiliated with the U-M
Program in Biomedical Science
(PIBS) and the U-M
Graduate Program in Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics (AIM).
Prof. Hero is a Fellow of IEEE, and Director of IEEE Division IX
(2010-11); he previously served as President of the IEEE Signal Processing
Society (2006-07). He has received an IEEE Signal Processing Society
Meritorious Service Award, an IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper
Award, and the IEEE Third Millenium Medal.
Prof. Hero has published more than 350 journal and conference papers, and
graduated approx. 30 PhD students. He is the author of the book,
Foundations and Application of Sensor Management.
_________________________________
1IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Volume 22, Issue 4,
July 2005, pp. 54-69, co-authored by Neal Patwari, Joshua N. Ash, Spyros
Kyperountas, Alfred O. Hero, III, Randolph L. Moses, and Neiyer S. Correal.
Posted: January 5, 2010 by
Catharine June
EECS/ECE Communications Coordinator
cmsj@umich.edu or 734-936-2965
| 
