ITR/SI+AP: Active Sensor Networks with Applications in Marine Microorganism Monitoring

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EIA-0121141Requicha, AristidesUniversity of Southern CaliforniaITR/SI+AP: Active Sensor Networks with Applications in Marine Microorganism MonitoringThe proposed research combines networking, distributed robotics, nanorobotics, and microbiology in an effort to develop and apply technology for the in-situ, real-time monitoring of microbial populations in aquatic environments, such as the ocean or water supply systems. The application context provides feedback from experiments with realistic systems, and this feedback is essential to the progress of the Information Technology (IT) research proposed here. This project addresses two key challenges for IT during this decade: moving from virtual to physical applications, and moving from macro to micro and nano.The IT focus is on the study of Physically-Coupled Scalable Information Infrastructures (PCSIIs), which effectively "embed the internet". The sensors and actuators in the proposed PCSII must have small physical dimensions, comparable to those of the microorganisms to be monitored. They must be deployed in very large numbers to achieve the unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution necessary to investigate the causal relationships between environmental conditions and microorganisms. Control and coordination of a multitude of such devices of limited and heterogeneous capabilities raise major challenges for networking, distributed coordination and distributed algorithms. Sensing for detection and identification of microorganisms is another challenge, which will be tackled by using nanorobotic Scanning Probe Microscope technology.