NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005 1541-1672/05/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE 85Published by the IEEE Computer Society

Editor: Alun PreeceUniversity of Aberdeenapreece@csd.abdn.ac.uk

G l o b a l I S

computing environments. (For more on the EPSRC, see www.epsrc.ac.uk.) WINES assumes an intelligent, pervasive infor-mation and communications technology environment willeventually emerge in which users experience a rich varietyof heterogeneous services and systems, delivered through awide range of devices. Users might carry or wear such de-vices, or the devices could be embedded in buildings andvehicles.

WINES supports multidisciplinary research consortiaseeking to apply techniques from various research com-munities—computing, electronics, materials, engineering,and the physical and social sciences—to specific applica-tion domains. It requires each group to target at least twoof the program’s nine key areas: autonomous systems,context awareness, human factors and social issues, infor-mation management and provenance, programming anddesign tools, sensor systems, systems theory, trust securityand privacy, and wireless communications.

To encourage new collaborations, it recommends thatconsortia members include representatives from both acade-mia and industry. The consortia must be based in the UKand aren’t required to be multi-institutional, but WINES viewsa mix of age and experience within a consortium as advanta-geous and encourages close industrial and public-sectorcollaboration as well as collaboration outside of the UK.

WINES posted its first call for proposals in August 2004(see http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/Projects/UbiNet/Documents/WINES%20call%20document.pdf), and inMarch 2005, it awarded £7.8 million in funding to sevengroups. Here I examine the objectives of four of the sevenprojects to provide a cross section of the activities in WINES.

TIME-EACM: Intelligent transportationsystems

Transport Information Monitoring Environment: Event

Architecture and Context Management (TIME-EACM) isa collaboration between the University of Cambridge andthe University of London’s Birkbeck College (see www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jmb/TIME-EACM.htm). The project ispart of TIME, a larger academic and industry collaborationin transport monitoring launched in 2004 in Cambridge.TIME’s industrial partners include BT (British Telecom,the specific partner on TIME-EACM), Boeing, IBM, Ora-cle, and Vodafone. TIME researchers hypothesize thatmonitoring, distributing, and processing traffic informationwill significantly increase transport efficiency. In particu-lar, they view timely information as a key enabler in thewider acceptance and uptake of public transport.

Cambridge is an ideal testbed for this research becauseof its diverse economy (including high-tech companies),variety of transport links (road, rail, bus, and so forth), andproximity to London. In the next decade, Cambridge isprojected to have 50,000 new jobs, 42,000 new homes, a36 percent increase in car trips, and a 57 percent increasein public-transportation volume (see www.cambridge-mit.org/industry/transport). Moreover, Cambridge alreadysuffers from severe traffic congestion.

TIME-EACM aims to give application developers auniform, open platform of event-based middleware thatwill let them share gathered data in a controlled andsecure way. Furthermore, the middleware platform willhelp keep the data robust despite changes in the underly-ing network and sensor technology. The goal is to helpintegrate existing and future transport information sys-tems, such as those monitoring traffic density, providinginformation displays at bus stops, controlling traffic sig-nals to ease congestion, routing emergency vehicles, anddisplaying live data on parking-lot capacities and taxiavailability. Currently, such systems offer only one serviceand are vertically integrated—the various tiers of softwarearchitecture serve a single set of requirements. An infor-mation platform that adds horizontal integration, deliver-ing multiple sets of requirements and services throughinterconnected tiers, will help researchers develop algo-rithms that can statically analyze data and infer trends. Inturn, policy makers could use this information for long-

The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research

Council launched its Wired and Wireless Intelligent

Networked Systems program in 2004 to address research

challenges in creating massive-scale ubiquitous and pervasive

WINES: Wired and WirelessIntelligent Networked Systems

Alun Preece, University of Aberdeen

term planning—for example, for decisionson toll-road fees or congestion charging(see www.cclondon.com).

BiosensorNet: Autonomicbiosensor networks

BiosensorNet consists of teams fromcomputing, biomedical engineering, elec-tronic engineering, and medicine at Imper-ial College London (see www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mss/Biosensornet.htm). The project goalis to create intelligent, self-managing, con-text-aware biosensing networks to improvepatient care. New miniaturized wirelessbiosensor technology provides site-specificinformation from the body, providing valu-able data sets on which to base clinical de-cisions (see figure 1). These new sensorswill form the basis of future pervasive health-care systems, which will monitor patients asthey go about their everyday activities. Suchsystems will notify patients and healthcareworkers of problems and compile data fortrend analysis and medical research.

These developments should reshape oper-ating practices in clinical medicine, espe-cially in preventing terminal illness, moni-toring a chronic disease’s progression, andassessing postoperative care and body reac-tion to complex therapeutic drug regimes.BiosensorNet hopes the networks it devel-ops will provide a practical platform for invivo sensing within a generic autonomicsensing architecture. The platform will need

to integrate local analog signal processingwith ultralow-power sensor interfaces andwireless data paths. Developing novel powerscavenging and management with in situanalog processing will significantly impactfuture wireless-sensor-network design. Thenetwork must recognize the environmentand physical context within which the signalis sensed. It also must form an autonomicsystem capable of self-configuring a net-work of sensors to provide reliable long-term adaptive sensing by fusing error-pronesignals from individual sensors.

Although BiosensorNet is situated in thehealthcare domain, potential applicationsof the autonomic sensing technology lie indiverse areas such as the environment,manufacturing, food processing, chemicalprocess monitoring, battlefield reconnais-sance, and transportation.

Cityware: Urban design andpervasive systems

Cityware examines the design of pervasivesystems featuring information and communi-cations technology systems as integral ele-ments of manmade environments in urbanareas (see www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/projects/Cityware.html). This will require designersto think about architectural spaces in newways—as interaction spaces wherein peoplediscover and use information and servicesthat support their movements and behaviorwithin those architectural spaces. The project

is an interdisciplinary collaboration betweenarchitects and computer scientists at the Uni-versity of Bath, Imperial College London,and University College London.

Recent research has addressed someaspects of pervasive systems in the relativelysmall-scale architecture of individual build-ings or rooms (see www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/projects/Citware.html), but Cityware consid-ers such systems on a much larger scale. Itaims to develop a set of well-founded, empir-ically tested, and practically applicable prin-ciples, tools, and techniques for the designand implementation of city-scale, long-termpervasive systems. In doing so, the projectexpects to advance our understanding of peo-ple’s relationships with urban space and withpublic pervasive technologies. These devel-opments will advance theory and practice inthe areas of designing space, context aware-ness, service discovery, trust, security, andprivacy.

Cityware researchers will conduct exten-sive evaluations by deploying a city-scalepervasive system that incorporates the re-search results. They’ll also perform longitudi-nal empirical studies of people’s lifestylesand relationships with urban space and perva-sive technologies.

NEMO: Networked embeddedmodels

NEMO is a three-way collaboration be-tween the computing, management, andpsychology departments at Lancaster Uni-versity (see www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/nemo).The project is looking into ubiquitous com-puting technologies and embedded wirelesssystems for industrial workplaces. It focuseson developing and using smart artifacts—work-related objects such as tools and con-tainers augmented with embedded comput-ing, sensing, and wireless communicationcapabilities. Industrial partners Agilent, BP,Carillion, and In Touch are closely involved.

The vision of networked physical entitiesrepresents a radical departure from the pre-vailing wireless sensor-network approach.The new approach relocates decision-mak-ing competence from the back-end infra-structure to the object itself, so it’s “wherethe action is.” Networked physical entitiespromise self-organizing activity-supportsystems that can handle decisions when andwhere required. This new quality will extendthe reach of activity support systems to newapplication scenarios with important impli-cations for safety-critical applications.

86 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

Figure 1. (a) An onbody wireless sensor node detects current activity, such as bodytemperature; (b) cardiac monitoring via implanted sensors, powered by heart motion,relays information to the onbody wireless node. The node then collates informationfrom multiple sensors and forwards it to the patient’s PDA or phone, which then sendsthe information to a remote medical monitoring system.

(a) (b)

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005 www.computer.org/intelligent 87

A key issue in NEMO is the develop-ment of embedded activity models for insitu decision making. The goal is to enablephysical entities to recognize the work activ-ities they’re involved in, to interpret thesewith respect to their safety-critical nature,and, if necessary, to inform the humanoperator about dangerous or unwanted situations. In effect, NEMO aims to turnphysical entities into active knowledgesources for human actors who performsafety-critical work activities.

In connection with this goal, NEMO isinvestigating the notion of life-long mem-ories associated with physical tools, arti-facts, and goods (addressing but reinter-preting the UK’s “Memories for Life”Grand Challenge; www.memoriesforlife.org). The goal is to enable physical enti-ties to capture, process, and share their“experiences” so researchers can performlong-term analyses of the entities’ individ-ual and collective activity patterns.

The three other WINES projects in theworks are

• Design, Implementation, and Adaptationof Sensor Networks through Multidimen-sional Codesign, a collaboration betweenthe universities of Glasgow, Manchester,Kent, St Andrews, and Strathclyde (seewww.dcs.gla.ac.uk/dias/Files/CfS-Full-final.pdf);

• ESPACENET—Evolvable Networks of Intel-ligent Secure Integrated & DistributedReconfigurable System-On-Chip SensorNodes for Aerospace-Based Monitoring& Diagnosis, a collaboration between theuniversities of Edinburgh, Kent, and Sur-rey (see www.e-spacenet.net); and

• Networking of Distributed Sensors forProactive Condition Monitoring of WindTurbines, a collaboration between theuniversities of Kent, Stirling, and Strath-clyde (see www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/research/prosen0/prosen.html).

Additionally, a second call for proposals(WINES II) closed in September (see www.epsrc.ac.uk/CallsForProposals/WiredAnd-WirelessIntellientNetworkedSystems.htm),with a further investment on the order of £5million. Of the 37 outline proposals submit-ted, the committee selected 11 and asked forfull proposals. After peer-review, the pro-posers will present their vision to an expertpanel in March 2006, when the final deci-sions will be made. Hopefully, the innova-tive research and synergy WINES has fosteredwill lead to future funding opportunities aswell. The application domains covered bycurrent and future WINES projects offer richand challenging testbeds for intelligent sys-tems research and development.

AcknowledgmentsThanks to Nafeesa Simjee (Information and

Communications Technology Program, EPSRC) forhelp in compiling this article and to members of theWINES first-call-funded projects for their input.

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