Highlight
WISeNet Seminar Course Developed
Achievement/Results
PI, Dr. Silvia Ferrari and the Program Coordinator, Amy Yonai, with the assistance of several faculty participants of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training Program (IGERT) on Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet) at Duke University have developed a WISeNet Seminar course/series. The course includes a pre-seminar lecture on the seminar topic with the seminar held the following week. Pre-seminar lectures are led by WISeNet faculty who prepare the students to receive the seminar material and to ask questions of speakers from any research community working on wireless sensor networks. Seminars include cross-cutting topics in environmental science, systems theory, and machine learning. The course aims to fill the intellectual gaps between environmental science, systems theory, and computer science.
First offered spring 2013, ten IGERT Trainees and Associates were enrolled with six WISeNet Seminars held. An average attendance of 30 at the seminars included faculty, graduate and undergraduate students from across the WISeNet departments, staff from the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and faculty from North Carolina Central University. Seminar speakers included: Dr. Marco Marani, Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering, Duke University (“Open Issues in the Observation of Ecological and Morphological Patterns in Tidal Environments”); Dr. Michael Zavlanos, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University (“Controlling Communications in Networks on Mobile Robots”); Dr. Francesco Bullo, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara (“Synchronization in Oscillator Networks and Smart Grids”); Dr. Paul Flikkema, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northern Arizona University (“Problems in Sensing, Inference and Control of Distributed Cyber-Ecological Systems”); Dr. Mike Bergin, Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology (“Particulate Matter (PM) Impacts on Human and Environmental Health and the Need for Wireless Sensors”); and Dr. Jonathan How, Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“Efficient Distributed Sensing Using Adaptive Censoring-Based Inference”). Pre-seminar lectures were led by WISeNet faculty Drs. Marco Marani, Michael Zavlanos, Alan Gelfand, Gaby Katul, and Silvia Ferrari.
Address Goals
The Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet) Seminar Course/Series addresses NSF’s strategic goals of learning and discovery by enhancing graduate eduction for Duke University students through an interdisciplinary seminar series. The seminar series strives to foster new research collaborations by providing an environment for learning and discovering new connections that can be made in the area of Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks. Receptions held after each seminar provide an opportunity for discussion with the speaker and those in attendance upon which new collaborations can be made and research ideas sparked.
