INSPIRE: Mingle: Sensing the Interactions of Animals

INSPIRE：Mingle：感知动物的互动

• 批准号: 1248080
• 负责人: Robin Kravets
• 金额: $ 80万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1248080&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: INSPIRE; Mingle; Sensing; Interactions; Animals

This CREATIV award is partially funded by the Networking Technologies and Systems (NeTS) program in the Division of Computer Networks and Systems in the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, the Animal Behavior program through the the Divisions of Integrative Organismal Systems and Emerging Frontiers in the Directorate of Biological Sciences, the Office of the Division Director in CISE/CNS and the Office of the Assistant Director in CISE. Despite many years of research on animal interactions, our information about the details of those interactions, especially in large groups of animals, is limited. Fortunately, today's technology can be used to extend our ability to track the social interactions of animals to a much larger scale. While collaborations between social networking and sensor networking researchers have started in the right direction, current approaches have not provided the depth of proximity and orientation information necessary to take the next logical step and infer social interactions between animals. The main challenge lies in the need to balance the accuracy of information about the animal interactions with the energy consumed by the devices themselves, with the ultimate goal of an effective, long running system. To this end, we have designed Mingle, an adaptive sensor-based systems that tracks social interactions between animals. The novelty of Mingle comes from the observation that such social interactions can be tracked by monitoring the animals' relative orientation and relative distance to each other. By relying on local information, Mingle optimizes energy efficiency by integrating local collaborative sensing with the judicious use of infrastructure-based solutions based on observations about the mobility of the animals. Finally, Mingle integrates real application constraints to ultimately drive energy-efficient data collection.Mingle has the potential to change education, science, and how we view our own society. The ability to see the very detailed social interactions about an entire population of animals will change how we understand and study them. Automating the process of the collection of information about animal, and human, interactions will free behavioral scientists from the collection process while providing data at the level of detail and magnitude never before possible. Moreover, entirely new educational curricula can be designed that engage children in scientific inquiry in fundamentally novel ways. For example, students will have the ability to "become the animals", enacting herding and foraging strategies. Additionally, information about the children's own social interactions will change educational research, enabling our understanding of how children learn in a group and through interactions. While we focus on social interactions between animals in this proposal, the results from this research can be taken into the human social networking domain, where many people already carry sensor-rich smartphones, enabling new and exciting social networking applications for interactions between people, exposing social networking information based on actual social interactions, or measuring social interactions to research social behavior and social patterns.

该CREATIV奖部分由计算机信息科学工程理事会计算机网络和系统部门的网络技术和系统（NetTS）计划，生物科学理事会综合有机系统和新兴前沿部门的动物行为计划，CISE/CNS部门主任办公室和CISE助理主任办公室资助。尽管对动物之间的相互作用进行了多年的研究，但我们对这些相互作用的细节，特别是在大型动物群体中的相互作用的信息是有限的。幸运的是，今天的技术可以用来扩展我们的能力，以更大的规模跟踪动物的社会互动。虽然社交网络和传感器网络研究人员之间的合作已经朝着正确的方向开始，但目前的方法还没有提供采取下一个逻辑步骤并推断动物之间的社交互动所需的接近度和方向信息的深度。主要的挑战在于需要平衡关于动物相互作用的信息的准确性与设备本身消耗的能量，最终目标是一个有效的、长期运行的系统。为此，我们设计了Mingle，这是一种基于传感器的自适应系统，可以跟踪动物之间的社交互动。Mingle的新奇来自于这样的观察，即这种社会互动可以通过监测动物的相对方向和彼此的相对距离来跟踪。Mingle依靠本地信息，通过将本地协作传感与基于动物移动性观察的基于基础设施的解决方案的明智使用相结合，优化了能源效率。最后，Mingle集成了真实的应用限制，最终推动节能数据收集。Mingle有潜力改变教育、科学以及我们如何看待自己的社会。 能够看到整个动物种群非常详细的社会互动将改变我们对它们的理解和研究。自动化收集动物和人类互动信息的过程将使行为科学家从收集过程中解放出来，同时提供前所未有的细节和数量级的数据。 此外，还可以设计全新的教育课程，以全新的方式让儿童参与科学探究。例如，学生将有能力“成为动物”，制定放牧和觅食策略。此外，有关儿童自身社会互动的信息将改变教育研究，使我们能够了解儿童如何在群体中和通过互动学习。 虽然我们专注于动物之间的社交互动，但这项研究的结果可以被纳入人类社交网络领域，许多人已经携带了传感器丰富的智能手机，为人与人之间的互动提供了新的令人兴奋的社交网络应用程序，基于实际的社交互动暴露社交网络信息，或测量社交互动以研究社交行为和社交模式。