PC3: Collaborative Research: Wireless Sensor Networks for Protecting Wildlife and Humans

该奖项为俄亥俄州立大学、康奈尔大学、印度科学研究所（班加罗尔）、印度野生动物研究所和印度信息技术研究所（阿拉哈巴德）之间的一个合作项目提供资金。森林的急剧减少以及随之而来的人类与野生动物冲突的升级，正在造成广泛的环境影响，包括巨大的经济和社会成本，在大型哺乳动物居住的地区，人类死亡人数增加，动物数量下降。该项目为保护动物、人类和森林提供了一个基线操作无线传感器网络系统。森林环境包含复杂的场景，需要在高度混乱的环境中辨别几个感兴趣的目标，以及辨别他们的意图和行为。活动模式在自然对抗的环境中进化。正在开发的系统架构以一种变革性的方式集成了一组适当丰富的传感模式，其中包括意图推理、学习、优化和部署技术，以监控各种目标。在与领域专家和林业管理部门的密切合作下，将在印度中部的老虎保护区Panna部署成熟的系统组件。该项目是美国和印度研究人员之间的合作，他们实质性地参与了野生动物相关研究的互补方面。预计美国将在吸取这一努力的经验教训的基础上，开展以保护为中心的后续努力。系统组成部分和基线系统的成功实现将导致对利用无线传感器网络进行森林保护和可能过渡到生产用途的潜在利益进行评估。随着时间的推移，这将有助于建立可信的早期预警系统，以及对动物利用人类活动区域和人类利用森林区域的监测协议，从而支持恢复工作。该项目是普适通信和计算协作（PC3）计划的一部分。

This award provides funding for a collaborative project between Ohio State University, Cornell University, The Indian Institute of Science - Bangalore, the Wildlife Institute of India, and the Indian Institute of Information Technology - Allahabad. The dramatic dwindling of forests and concomitant escalation in human-wildlife conflicts are resulting in broad environmental impact, including large economic and social costs, increasing human deaths in areas used by large mammals, and animal population decline. This project enables a baseline operational wireless sensor network system for protection of animals, humans, and the forest. The forest setting involves complex scenes demanding the discrimination of several targets of interest in a highly cluttered setting as well as discrimination of their intent and behaviors. Activity patterns evolve in a naturally adversarial environment. The system architecture being developed integrates in a transformative way a suitably rich set of sensing modalities with intent inferencing, learning, optimization, and deployment techniques, to monitor a diverse set of targets. Mature system components are to be deployed in Panna, a tiger reserve in central India, in close cooperation with domain experts and forestry management. The project is a collaboration between researchers in the US and India who are substantially involved in complementary aspects of wildlife related research. A subsequent protection-centric effort in the US is envisioned that builds upon the lessons learned by this effort. Successful realization of system components and a baseline system would lead to an assessment of the potential benefits of using wireless sensor networks for protection related to forests and potential transition into production use. Over time, this will help establish credible early-warning systems, and monitoring protocols for animal use of human areas and human use of forest areas that can support recovery efforts. This project is part of the Pervasive Communications and Computing Collaboration (PC3) initiative.