Meeting with Paddy – pep talk to make me feel better – Paddy took 3 1/2 years to complete PhD, but changed his subject after tranfer report – and still managed to finish on time – even though I AM NOT brighter than him, I should be ok 😉
OK – lets get going with the city wide environmental sensing!

Need to think about:
What simulators are there? What infrastructure do we need to get it to work?
The underlying hard questions are:
1- Collecting Data
Offloading data in normal operation to fixed nodes or drop off points about the city-
issues
- Storage
- Sampling
- Longevity
- Power consumption
- Date/Time corroboration
The things on the body communicate, perhaps one is doing the monitoring, and others are managing the storage and dissemination of data across local nodes
Managed the local set as a community
2 – Global Control – Global Phenomena drives local operations
If we can assume nodes have a facility to geo-locate themselved, nodes can use or build a map of the area they are in. As the overall control system (?) detects issues or hotspots, it may increase the frequency of sampling in a particular area – this will require mechanisms to cope with this – considering multiple hot spots.
The idea being that some how nodes would be told to make more detections on certain areas – or even based on certain criteria – e.g if CO2 level > x increase freq.?
This then feeds back to the community – perhaps imagined as a big async. query over the community.
3 – Cute part
When nodes pass through a hot-spot – what happens if they are not going past any other known drop off node? Communicate with a node passing the other way through? How to we manage this and what data – dead-reckoning? probability of passing another node?
Do the nodes always promiscuosly send data – or just sometimes?
Nodes Collaborate to communicate a response and are managed as a community or a swarm
We defined some next actions:
1 – Create 1 page vision document – deadline 3-4 days
To describe –
- Community management
- Fixed Nodes about an space
- Group of devices about a person
- Community of individuals with wearables
- Granularity of resources (?)
- How the overall community will work – what will be the infrastructure – given our resources
2 – Slick the document up, and send it off to out peers in Harvard, to see if it will fit into their project
3 – When bored of writing – consider:
- How do cities work? where do people go?
- How do we simulate a city wide sensor network like this
- Look at existing applications to simulate cities -flame.ac.uk – metropolis.tcd.ie – Steve Collins and Carol Sullivan
- Look into cheap environmental sensors – bluetooth based – if we can get some which are cheap enough – we can get some and deploy over CASL/CSI/Campus?
4 – Overall Goal is to have a 6 month project – which will support my PhD, to make these new tecniques that we will develop – either as a simulation, real world deployment, or a mixture of both,
- Will need to research the idea of decision theory
- Community resource management
5 – Personal Task
- to find out what research is going on in UCD and Clarity
- Start with Barry Smith – ask who is doing what work – paddy wants to do wearbles – and wants to know who’s doing what research in the area
6 – Look for places to put position papers into
Finally – we need to keep some pressure on – and have some quick turn-arounds – and I should talk go talk to him if the ideas we discussed dont make sense afterwards.