I am very excited about the progress we’ve made with Sensorpedia recently. In just a few short weeks, our team of interns has interfaced dozens of sensor systems and we’ve worked together to iron out issues with the Sensorpedia API and web application.

Beta testers will notice significant performance updates with the latest version of the software. Personally, I have had fun this week experimenting with the open source Marker Clusterer library for the Google Maps API that I’ve now employed, enabling the display of literally hundreds of markers per layer. Use of the clustering library is straightforward and easy to add to your own mapping application. Here are a few snippets from the Sensorpedia application showing how we applied it in our application.

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Hi all,
I’m Brandon Zachary. I’m currently a sophomore at Tuskegee University pursuing a Double Major in Computer Science and Mathematics. I play baseball for Tuskegee as well as participate in other clubs and organizations at my school. I am really looking forward to working more and more on the Sensorpedia project, and I hope that I can provide new ideas and information to it. I have currently uploaded some NOAA ocean buoys along the Eastern United States Coast. My latest upload was Earthquake sensors in South America, the United States, and the Pacific Rim. Working on a third-party app for viewing of the air quality of popular National Parks.
Out

Hello, my name is Jason Frank.  I’m a computer science student at the University of Tennessee and I’m interning here at Sensorpedia this summer.  I’m planning to introduce myself more thoroughly with a video blog that I will post in a couple of weeks.  Stay tuned… this video will also give you a little behind-the-scenes view of the atmosphere and people of Sensorpedia.  In the meantime, let me explore some thoughts and questions that have been posed to me during this internship.

• Does Zen have a place in computer science?
• If users of a simple web app find that they struggle to use it, is it their fault or the the designer’s?
• What visual elements should be included in a web app…or more importantly, which elements should not be included?

So why are these questions relevant to what we do here at Sensorpedia? To answer that, I should tell you a little about my mentor here at Sensorpedia, David Resseguie. David has spent a lot of time studying what is commonly called, “human-computer interaction”. That may sound a little abstract, but really it is just about a user’s experience working with some piece of equipment. A cell phone, for instance. Or you could think of it in terms of everyday household items. My wife can attest to my dislike of standard household lamps. You know how you have to reach your arm down under the lampshade, but then back up next to the bulb and fiddle around trying to find the switch? Yea, bad design. These are the sort of things that David has learned to apply to working with software applications.

Understanding the importance of human-computer interaction, David has instructed us to read some books dedicated to topics in this area. One such book that I have been reading is called, “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds. This book is geared more towards presenting information with the aid of visuals, but I believe its concepts apply to building software applications as well. In the book, Reynolds quotes author John Daido Loori, saying the Zen aesthetic “…reflects a simplicity that allows our attention to be drawn to that which is essential, stripping away the extra.”

So what’s the bottom line? How do we as computer scientists (OK, budding computer scientists) apply these principles? I would say that it is our job as software developers to make the end user’s experience easy and enjoyable. This means we must spend the hours necessary to think through the user’s experience. David is teaching us that we need to ask ourselves the right questions: Where is the user’s eye being drawn? Is that logo really needed on this page? Does the background obscure the text there? Is there something I can leave out to improve the readability? Maybe Zen does have a place in computer science.

Hey guys,

My name is Brandon Rives and I am currently interning with the Sensorpedia project this summer. I will be attending

Tuskegee University as a Sophomore this fall semester and I’m from Birmingham, AL. I am really enjoying interning

with Sensorpedia at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) even though I’ve only been here a for few weeks! Within

the past few weeks, I’ve added sensors such as the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) cameras, Alabama

Department of Transportation (ALDOT) cameras, and U.S. River Levels to the Sensorpedia database. This week I’ve

started working on my third party application which will be used for getting water data off the Sensorpedia database

and displaying real-time RSS warning alers for levels. I’ve named it Sensorpedia H2O and as of yesterday I’ve designed

the logo banner (as seen above), the main page, and the navigational tools. Today I’ve been researching various ways to

link the Sensorpedia database to my app. I will be posting up to date progress on the Sensorpedia Blog. Thanks and stay tuned!

My name is Tim Garvin. I’m a summer intern here at Oak Ridge National Lab, working on Sensorpedia with David and a host of others.  During the school year, I’m an undergraduate in computer engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, working my way towards an eventual masters in that field.  My career interests, very broadly, hover somewhere around the areas of hardware design and development, network security (traffic analysis, intrusion detection), and the internal workings of most anything that’s not a user interface.  I have a love of assembly and low level programming, as they require greater understanding and control of algorithms, but have also recently experienced the joys of python, with which I am doing some development currently.

Over the past year or so, Chris Tomkins-Tinch spent a fair amount of time describing to me how great his experience had been working on Sensorpedia.  His excitement spread then to me, and now I find myself HERE @ ORNL, working on a variety of issues, very excited about helping to build a service and site at which any conceivable sensor data can live and be useful.  In a world where sharing data freely among interested people is increasingly valued, sensor data can still be prohibitively hard to gather together.  I’m confident that Sensorpedia is part of the key to closing the many gaps between all different types of sensors and sensor systems.

My list of activities here have grown over the three short weeks I’ve been here.  So far they include:

• Helping to get existing sensor systems visible on the web app.
• Writing a python library to generate Sensorpedia-compatible ATOM feeds (Coming Soon!)
• Applying the Sensorpedia architecture to some real world problems

Over the next few months, you’ll be hearing from me (well, and everyone else) regarding the latest and greatest in Sensorpedia Development.

In the meantime, check out our API site to get a better feel of what’s going on with Sensorpedia.

Hi, I’m Darren Shea.  I am a junior at Illinois College studying management information systems and accounting while also playing on the basketball team.  This is my first summer at ORNL and I have really enjoyed working with the Sensorpedia team so far.

In my first few weeks at ORNL I have mainly been working on the Sensorpedia web application.  I’ve been surfing the web looking for relevant preexisting sensor feeds to incorporate into our map.  Some of these have included weather alerts, volcano monitoring, and air quality sensors.  I’m also currently brainstorming on possible 3^rd party applications.

Hi, I’m Chris Tomkins-Tinch. After a brief stint furthering my imaging science studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I am back at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) continuing work for Sensorpedia.

Previously at ORNL from June until March, I helped with Sensorpedia planning and the web frontend, and also authored several guides demonstrating how easy it is to produce Sensorpedia-friendly data:

• How To: Interface an irradiance sensor with Sensorpedia
• How To: Interface a light color sensor with Sensorpedia and serve Atom!
• How To: Interface an ultrasonic rangefinder with Sensorpedia via Twitter
• How To: Setup a Sensorpedia Sensing Station

This time around, I’m joined by several other interns. We are working to introduce new data feeds to Sensorpedia and populate the map with great information. I am also working on a mobile application that will turn any iPhone into a sensor platform. Imagine snapping a picture and having it appear on the Sensorpedia map moments later! Check out the concept sketches (PDF, 10.9 MB) to see what it will be all about (read more below):

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We are very excited to have seven student interns this year working on the Sensorpedia project. They hail from universities across the US bringing fresh perspective and new ideas to our research. The following guys join a record 361 interns at Oak Ridge National Laboratory this summer.

• Richard Edwards - University of Tennessee
• Jason Frank - University of Tennessee
• Tim Garvin - Rochester Institute of Technology
• Brandon Rives - Tuskegee University
• Darren Shea - Illinois College
• Chris Tomkins-Tinch - Rochester Institute of Technology
• Brandon Zachary - Tuskegee University

Each intern is working to interface a variety of sensor and other data sources with Sensorpedia. In addition, each student will be designing and implementing a “3rd Party” application that utilizes the Sensorpedia Atom-based framework to address a domain-specific need such as freight tracking, emergency management, or environmental monitoring. Watch the blog over the next few days and weeks as the students introduce themselves and provide updates on their work this summer.

We’re really excited about the progress we’re making on Sensorpedia and are looking forward to opening up the system soon to a broader beta test group. Please subscribe to the blog and follow us on Twitter to get all the latest updates.