Finding Rubies in the Dust

Abstract: Since the early days of Wireless Sensor Networks to today's Internet of Things there have been over twenty years of research. A quick Google Scholar search reveals well over 700k papers with 'Wireless Sensor Network' and 500k with 'Internet of Things'. However, when one talks to real users in the worlds of civil engineering, environment modelling, digital agriculture and the industrial IoT etc. they complain about the systems being flaky and completely unusable after a few years. Real users of networked sensor systems want smart infrastructures that are reliable. In my talk I will discuss some of the issues sensor systems designers face, and put forward some of my thoughts of how we can reuse our infrastructure and our knowledge of cyber-physical interaction so we can turn noise into new or better signals.

Julie A. McCann is a Professor in Computer Systems with Imperial College London and is currently Interim Vice Dean Research in the Faculty of Engineering. Her research centres on decentralized and self-organizing scalable algorithms and protocols for Wireless Sensor systems, Internet of Things, or Cyber-physical systems. She leads the Adaptive Embedded Systems Engineering Research (AESE) research group who examine cyber-physical interaction to design better sensor-based systems. She is Deputy Director of PETRAS IoT Cybersecurity Hub, Critical Ecosystems Lead for the Alan Turing Institute, and Imperial PI on the EPSRC programme grant Science for Sensor Systems Software. She has a number of international research collaborations including Singapore NRF funded Eco-Cities (she has a sub-lab in Singapore with I2R and HDB), and until recently directed the Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI) for Sustainable Cities, as well as other projects though EU FP7/H2020 programmes. McCann is an elected Member of the Council of Computer Science Professors and Heads of Computing, and was elected to the membership committee of the UKCRC, she holds the 2018 UKRI Suffrage Science Award for Computing and Mathematics, President’s Medal for Research Excellence 2020, and is a Fellow of the BCS and Chartered Engineer.