In the future buildings will be studded with sensors. Every movement
will generate a few bits of data. Every fluctuation in temperature will be
recorded. Every deviation in lighting will be noticed. These large and
complex datasets will challenge the tools we use today. Are the tools we
use to understand our data scalable to the tens of millions of records,
huge spans of time, minute details of behavior, and large geographic extent
that future sensor networks will generate?
These sensors will be installed to make our lives better: to make our
buildings more comfortable, more efficient, and more enriching places to
live and work. The sensors seem non-threatening, because they are so
simple. Everyone understands that there is a danger to installing networks
of cameras or microphones in buildings, but what of these simple sensors?
It's important to explore these questions and understand how much we can
learn about the people living under these sensors.
Our research shows that simple sensors can be used to make building
systems more efficient. They can also be used to make camera networks far
more powerful. They can be used to measure the work habits of people.
They also expose the habitual patterns of the social web that connects us
to co-workers and friends. We find that even simple sensors
reach deeply into our lives when they become ubiquitous.
Yuri A. Ivanov, Christopher R. Wren, Alexander Sorokin, Ishwinder Kaur.
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics,
ISSN: 1077-2626, Volume 13, number 6. Nov-Dec 2007
IEEE Xplore,
(
MERL TR2007-068)
SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building
Christopher R. Wren, Yuri A. Ivanov, Ishwinder Kaur,
Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues.
Third International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness.
September 2007. Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.
DOI
()
MERL TR2007-034)
Buzz: Measuring and Visualizing Conference Crowds
Christopher R. Wren, Yuri A. Ivanov, Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues,
Mariela Buchin, Pavan Turaga.
ACM SIGGRAPH 2007
Emerging Technologies, San Diego, CA, USA. August 2007.
DOI
(
MERL TR2007-035)
Toward Scalable Activity Recognition for Sensor Networks
Christopher R. Wren and Emmanuel Munguia Tapia.
Second International Workshop on Location- and Context-Awareness.
May 2006. Dublin, Ireland.
DOI.
(
MERL TR2006-011)
Worse is Better for Ambient Sensing
Carson J. Reynolds and Christopher R. Wren
Pervasive 2006 Workshop on Privacy, Trust and Identity Issues for
Ambient Intelligence.
May 7th, 2006. Dublin, Ireland.
(
MERL TR2006-005)
Functional Calibration for Pan-Tilt-Zoom Cameras
in Hybrid Sensor Networks
Christopher R. Wren, U. Murat Erdem, Ali J. Azarbayejani.
ACM Multimedia Systems Journal,
Special Issue on Multimedia Surveillance Systems.
Volume 12, number 3. December 2006.
DOI
(
MERL TR2005-084)
Similarity-based analysis for large networks of
ultra-low resolution sensors
Christopher R. Wren, David Minnen, and Srinivas G. Rao.
Pattern Recognition.
Special Issue on Similarity-Based Pattern Recognition.
Volume 39, number 10, October 2006.
DOI
(
MERL TR2005-003)