Special Sessions

Special Session proposals are being accepted for SAS 2014.

To submit your paper to a Special Session, please select the Special Session track in EDAS.

*Please note that Special Session papers are reviewed using the same criteria as general track papers and are not guaranteed inclusion in a Special Session.

Current proposed Special Sessions for SAS 2014:

*ENVIRONMENTAL AND AGRITECH-RELATED SENSORS

*SENSORS AND SYSTEMS FOR EMERGENCY AND FIRST RESPONSE

*EFFICIENT SENSOR NETWORK PROCESSING

*SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE ELECTROMAGNETIC SENSORS

*COMPUTER VISION AND MACHINE LEARNING FOR VISION-BASED APPLICATIONS

ENVIRONMENTAL AND AGRITECH-RELATED SENSORS

Organizer: Ian Woodhead, Chief Scientist, LINCOLN AGRITECH LTD, New Zealand and Ian Platt, Senior Scientist, LINCOLN AGRITECH LTD, New Zealand

Many sensors have direct relevance to agriculture and the environment, especially given the increased use of technology in agriculture where better and less resource intensive methods are being sought to increase productive efficiency and to lower the impact of agriculture on the environment, e.g. NIR sensing for plant nitrogen requirements. The impact of agricultural practice is in turn monitored by specialist sensors such as turbidity and nitrate sensors for public waterways.

This combined field of Environmental and Agritech is highly relevant to researchers from both developed and developing regions, and sensors have the potential to monitor and hence enable better management of the ongoing tension between the increasing demands for agricultural productivity and reduced environmental impact.

Submissions are welcome on technology and applications for remote or proximal sensors in the spatial (geo) and temporal (time) domains covering, for example:

-Soil and waterway contaminant detection
-Weather and air sensors
-E-nose sensors
-Sensors for soil nutrients
-Water content of soil and agricultural produce
-Animal health sensing
-Plant health sensors
-Sensors for agricultural machinery and robots
-Sensor and sensor data fusion
-Sensor connectivity and networking

SENSORS AND SYSTEMS FOR EMERGENCY AND FIRST RESPONSE

Organizers: Eric T. Matson (Purdue University, USA), Dong Han Kim (Kyung Hee University, South Korea), Jinung An (DGIST, South Korea)

Sensors, sensor systems and robots have great potential in first response and emergency domains. The requirements to handle fires, nuclear emergencies, petroleum spills and other emergency scenarios are growing and the technology developed to assess, interpret, analyze and remediate these situations must respond to the need. At the center of any emergency scenario are people who can be put into danger by the very nature of their work. Sensors, systems and robot applications, in this area, can prevent loss of function and life for these people that serve to protect others.

There are many common passive and active sensors and systems and equipment applications used in fire fighting, police, and various area of emergency and first response work. This special session is devoted to new and novel applications of sensors and sensor systems to address the needs in the task domain of emergency and first response workers.

Submissions are welcome on:

- Individual sensors for emergency applications

- Novel models and prototypes of sensors for emergency applications

- Chemical, gas, petroleum-based and nuclear sensors for emergency work

- Sensor systems for emergencies

- First response and emergency robots

- Fire fighting robots

- Other sensors, systems or robot applications in the area of emergency and first response

EFFICIENT SENSOR NETWORK PROCESSING

Organizers: Matthias Vodel (Technische Universitaet Chemnitz, Germany)

Sensor networks and the respective communication concepts represent a promising research area during last decade. New technologies and the miniaturisation of the hardware platforms allow novel and innovative application scenarios. Nowadays, the development focuses on two main challenges.

The first one deals with energy efficiency and accordingly with an efficient operation & communication in a distributed, energy self-sufficient environment. The available energy resources are strongly limited and in consequence, developers are looking for new ways to maximise the runtime. In order to provide an optimised system architecture, the different network layers as well as the application configuration and the environmental behaviour must fit together.

The second challenge deals with huge amounts of data and the respective issues regarding prioritisation and integrity. A lot of application scenarios consist of multiple data monitoring tasks in a distributed measurement environment, including time-critical relations between these tasks. Here, the organisation of the network infrastructure, as well as the data processing capabilities represents key parameters. 

Novel hardware platforms and innovative data processing approaches offer promising possibilities. The research goal is an optimal trade-off between energy efficiency and application-specific computational power.

In this session, we invite original research papers on these subjects.

Submissions are welcome on:

- Application & network-clustering in wireless sensor networks
- Virtual sensor approaches
- Energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks
- Hardware-acceleration for sensor network scenarios
- Data aggregation and data fusion approaches for time-critical sensor data processing

SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE ELECTROMAGNETIC SENSORS

Organizers: Vedran Bilas (University of Zagreb, Croatia), Mohd Zaid Abdullah (University Sains Malaysia)

Combination of electromagnetic sensors (of one or more modalities) has been successfully applied in areas such as navigation, medical imaging, nondestructive testing, food inspection, agriculture, healthcare, hydrocarbon production, demining, safety and security. Multi sensor nature of the systems introduces new challenges in hardware and algorithms for signal acquisition, processing, integration or cooperation.

The goal of this special session is to bring together researches from various fields to exchange ideas and present novel results in the development, implementation and deployment of the multi-electromagnetic-sensors systems.

Submissions are welcome on:

- Applications of systems of electromagnetic sensors
- Electromagnetic modeling and computation techniques relevant to sensor applications
- Inversion and signal processing algorithms
- Novel electromagnetic sensors and new electromagnetic sensor technologies
- New sensing systems
- Frequency and time domain signal processing
- Multi sensor data fusion
- Sensor networks

COMPUTER VISION AND MACHINE LEARNING FOR VISION-BASED APPLICATIONS

Organizers: Serge Demidenko (RMIT International University, Vietnam), Melanie Ooi (Monash University, Malaysia)

Computer vision is a field of research that acquires, processes and analyses video and image data taken from the real world. Machine learning is a field of study that analyses and recognises patterns from a given dataset to perform tasks such as classification, regression and intelligent decision-making. The combination of the two broad fields of computer vision and machine learning widens the application of sensors and robotics. Imagery from sensor inputs are processed through computer vision techniques, while machine learning can be applied to make intelligent decisions based on the data.

This special session is intended to draw researchers from the fields of computer vision and machine learning to present new techniques and solutions for sensor applications. Submissions are welcomed on:

1. Segmentation, Detection and Tracking

2. Image analysis and classification

3. Autonomous vision-based navigation

4. Automatic vision-based inspection systems

5. Behavioural Analysis