The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


"Event Detection for Sensor Networks"

By

Mr. Wenwei Xue


Abstract

Many applications of wireless sensor networks, such as object tracking and
disaster monitoring, require effective and efficient techniques to detect
events of interest in the physical world. Despite the simplicity in
implementation, the existing threshold-based approach to event detection
suffers from a limited expressive power and a poor tolerance to missing
values and errors in sensor data. In this thesis, we present three novel
database approaches to event detection for sensor networks: (i) a
pattern-based approach that abstracts events as temporal patterns on
individual sensor nodes, (ii) a contour map-based approach that represent
events as spatial shapes in the sensor value distribution across nodes,
and (iii) a model-based approach that specifies events as regression
models over spatial regions in the sensor network. The key observation of
all three approaches is that, because an event generates a particular kind
of sensor data distribution, the problem of event detection can be
converted into that of matching this distribution. In each of the three
proposed approaches, we formalize the event specification and develop
efficient matching algorithms. The experimental results on both real-world
and synthetic data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of
our proposed approaches.


Date:			Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Time:			2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:			Room 4483
			Lifts 25-26

Chairman:		Prof. Mo Mu (MATH)

Committee Members:	Prof. Qiong Luo (Supervisor)
			Prof. Dik Lun Lee
			Prof. Lionel Ni
			Prof. Oscar Au (ECE)
			Prof. Jeffrey Xu Yu (Sys. Engg. & Engg. Mgmt., CUHK)



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