Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering

Infrastructure Systems

The past half-century has seen explosive growth in the world population, with society's numbers burgeoning from 2.5 billion in 1950, to 7.3 billion in 2015. During this same period, the population of the United States followed suit, more than doubling, from 157 million to 325 million.

This rapid population increase has strained natural resources and infrastructure systems in myriad ways, at multiple scales – but disproportionately so for urban areas, where more than 80% of the U.S. population now resides. The population density challenges range from ensuring the safety of tens of millions of citizens, to managing highly dynamic energy, water, and transportation demands, to mitigating pollution impacts.

The challenges are so complex that they have outstripped humans' unaided intellectual capacity to address them. This important observation is a fundamental tenet of the Smart City vision, and a focal point for researchers working in the Infrastructure Systems area.

Health and Behavior

Healthcare researchers and other professionals stand at the forefront of a paradigm shift that is poised to revolutionize the management and delivery of health services around the world. This paradigm shift is being driven through the miniaturization and commoditization of mobile health sensing technology, in concert with rapid advancements in cloud computing and big data analytics.

Real-time data streams detailing key physiological indicators and health behaviors, in combination with new mobile intervention strategies have the potential to transform healthcare into a radically personalized, proactive system that touches every aspect of healthcare, from assessment services, to hospital management, to rehabilitative care, to in-home monitoring, and everything in-between.

The greatest benefits that will be achieved through the emerging Internet of Things will be the fundamental improvements to health and wellness that this new technology will enable. Helping to realize those improvements is the focus of researchers working in the Health and Behavior area.

Marine and Environment

Population growth, industrialization, and climate change are putting the nation's marine and environmental resources at risk, from the dwindling aquifers in California's Central Valley, to the threatened waters of Florida's Everglades. Human impacts on these resources and their reflected impacts on humans can be catastrophic, disrupting regional ecosystems, reducing biodiversity, damaging food crops, and compromising human health. The enormity of the management challenges stems from the plexus of relationships that link climate change, land use, water, agriculture, and forestry.

Discerning meaningful connections requires programs that span air, land, and ocean, and which are fundamentally grounded in data-enabled science. Developing and applying the sensing technologies, computing tools, and analytical techniques that enable this data-driven approach are the focus of researchers working in the Marine and Environment area.