It’s hard to believe 10 weeks have already passed, but the summer internships at ORNL wrapped up today. I big Thank You! is in store for all the hard work this summer from Ashley Dailey, Jason Frank, and Tim Garvin. All three played a critical part of making this a very successful and productive summer for Sensorpedia. I realize that not much has changed on the Sensorpedia web application during the initial beta (alpha?) release. But we haven’t been sitting still either. We’ve actually been using the Sensorpedia software (primarily the backend services) on a number of other projects here at ORNL for our government customers. Ashley, Jason, and Tim have played a big role in incorporating much of the lessons learned from these other projects back into Sensorpedia proper. Stay tuned for several blog posts from the team that I’ve got queued up to explain several of the latest changes. And you won’t want to miss the latest video that’s in the works either…

This summer I worked on creating an iPhone application for Sensorpedia. The goal of the project was to develop a software application that can be run on a mobile computing device and used to transmit distributed data readings from citizens and first responders in near-real time. This application will permit citizens to rapidly report event information, such as disaster occurrences, security anomalies, and accounts of emergencies. It will allow field users to contribute to Sensorpedia. It is currently in transition from the simulator to the hardware. Here is a presentation on the application (view full screen to see the presenter text):

Here is the poster I presented about it to the 2009 ORNL summer student poster session on August 5, 2009:

Thank you to David Resseguie for all of your help and ever-willing guidance, Bryan Gorman and the rest of CSED for being a great division to work with, ORNL and ORISE for allowing me to come back and live among the other summer students, and thank you to those funding Sensorpedia for making this sort of summer educational program possible. It has been a great summer; I am glad to have learned a host of new technical skills and am happy that I had the opportunity to put them to use for Sensorpedia.

Well, it’s around the beginning of August and it’s time to head out back to our universities and hometowns. First of all, I’ve got to say that I’ve had a blast working and learning with these guys at ORNL! I started this internship with knowledge in C++ alone and as a result ended with skills in HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX.

Throughout the summer, I have registered Tennessee Department of Transportation traffic cameras and United States Geographic Survey river level sensors to Sensorpedia. I’ve also completed the basic operations of my third party application entitled Sensorpedia H2O! I have learned a lot of programming techniques and also got hands-on  experience in the work industry which is priceless.

So, in all, I loved my experience at ORNL with the Sensorpedia team and I’m really going to miss all the guys! And it’s a wrap! –Brandon Rives
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It’s August, and the time of interns at Sensorpedia for the summer is coming to an end.  This internship has been a fantastic experience in every possible way, and has helped me develop professionally and technically, to say nothing of the immense and invaluable knowledge of presentation and communication techniques that David has imparted on us.  My sincerest thanks go out to all who have funded us and made this summer possible.

The Sensorpedia Python Library

But let’s talk about Sensorpedia, shall we?  This summer, I’ve focused mainly on the Python library, which while far from really being complete, is now stable and creating feeds.  The Python library provides a “Pythonic” frontend to Sensorpedia, such that registration feeds that are large or that need to be dynamically generated can be generated with a more intuitive and simple programming interface, without having to know anything at all about ATOM or XML.  The library is already being used in several projects and sensor feeds:

• Brandon Zachary’s air quality sensors from the EPA
• Chris Tomkins-Tinch’s iPhone app ("We too are sensors.")
• A feed generated by Chris from Harvard’s Citysense
• ~2000 ICAO weather sensors (updated with current data readings once every hour)
• Several hundred NOAA buoy sensors located offshore of various American coastlines

Feedback from some of these feeds and projects is already helping me decide what the next iteration of the library will look like.  We’re hoping to open source the library and other parts of Sensorpedia such that  people not necessarily associated with the lab can contribute as their interests dictate.  I’m hoping that in the future, regardless of my affiliation with the lab, I’ll be able to continue contributing to this library as a personal project in conjunction with some of my related projects.

As of this writing, the current version of the library is 0.2.3.  You’ll note that we’re nowhere near 1.0 yet, and this is to indicate that the library, as with the rest of Sensorpedia, is still very much in progress.  The interface can (and probably will) change quite a bit as the development cycle renews itself.  That being said, I consider the library to be very stable under normal operation, and would put it forward as a painless way to generate Sensorpedia registration feeds programmatically.

The current version of the library can be found here.

I’ve enjoyed my summer here working along with the Sensorpedia project. I’ve been able to contribute a lot to a project that I feel will be a beneficial project in the future to come. Also, pretty happy to see that we have reached a milestone with the sensor count at over 3000 sensors. I hope to be able to keep contributing fresh ideas to support to David, Bryan, and the rest of Sensorpedia.

Thanks for a Great Summer

My mouth is going dry, my mind is leaving, I’m beginning to sweat… I must be filming the Sensorpedia video blog…

Here is the outtakes version:

Trouble seeing the video? View Sensorpedia: Who and Where (Outtakes) on YouTube.

Have you ever visited the website of a company or organization but still just couldn’t quite get a “feel” for what the place or the people there were really like? Perhaps you couldn’t visualize the physical layout of the campus, or maybe the people mentioned didn’t seem “human” in the context of cyberspace. Or was it that you could not sense the organization’s history and how it came to be as it is today? I’ve oftentimes felt these things too. So, as promised in an earlier blog post, I recently shot a video blog to answer these types of questions about myself, Sensorpedia, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Pay special attention to the first-time-ever-revealed interests of my mentor, David Resseguie.

Trouble seeing the video? View Sensorpedia: Who and Where on YouTube.

Update: The Video Blog Outtakes is now on YouTube too!

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.

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.