Gul A Agha
Lecturer Gul A Agha (University of Illinois)
Title Monitoring Civil Infrastructure: An Actor-oriented Approach to Scalable Smart Sensing
Date Tuesday 13/06/2017, 16.00
Location S1|01 Karolinenplatz 5, Darmstadt Room A4
Abstract

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) provide the ability to continuously monitor and effect the environment. WSANs will improve the safety of rails, bridges, heavy equipment and dams by detecting changes in vibration and strain. By identifying damage rapidly, such monitoring enables a more effective response to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Our approach pushes processing onto the embedded nodes--providing robustness through decentralized actor-based computing and behavioral guarantees through probabilistic reasoning. We have developed and implemented generic algorithms for time synchronization, self-localization, message routing, energy management and resilient distributed computing, as well as domain specific algorithms for event detection, data collection, and in-network data analysis. The technology has been used to monitor several bridges, including the Jindo Bridge--a 484 meter long cable-stayed bridge connecting Jindo Island to the Korean peninsula. From 2008 to 2012, the bridge was densely instrumented with 113 solar-powered Imote2 wireless sensor nodes, providing over 700 combined sensor channels measuring acceleration, strain, temperature and wind data. We envision that sensing combined with actuation will improve the safety of civil infrastructure.
Short Bio

Gul Agha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is in the area of programming models and languages for open distributed and embedded computation. Dr. Agha is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Meritorious Service Award, and the ACM Recognition of Service Award. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE
Parallel and Distributed Technology (1994-98) and of ACM Computing Surveys (1999-2007). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Computing Now. His book on Actors, published by MIT Press, is among the most widely cited works in concurrency. Dr. Agha has published over 250 research articles and supervised over 30 PhD disertations. He is a co-founder of Embedor Technologies, providing solutions for infrastructure monitoring using sensor networks.