Networked Sensing of Airborne Chemical Cocktails
Olga Saukh
Assistant professor at Institute for Technical Informatics - TU Graz
DEIB - PT1 Room (building 20)
February 16th, 2018
11.00 am
Contact:
Luca Mottola
Research Line:
Advanced software architectures and methodologies
Assistant professor at Institute for Technical Informatics - TU Graz
DEIB - PT1 Room (building 20)
February 16th, 2018
11.00 am
Contact:
Luca Mottola
Research Line:
Advanced software architectures and methodologies
Sommario
Ambient air is a complex mixture of chemicals with poorly understood interactions and feedbacks. Car exhaust, secondhand smoke, factory emissions, cosmetics, glues, paints, etc. constitute the air we breathe and yes, every breath we take is an airborne chemical cocktail. After having been processed by our body, exhaled air contains numerous markers about the state of our health. Fruity odors in the breath, for example, relate to diabetics; foul ones to respiratory tract infections. Also in daily lives, we use smell to test the freshness and quality of food and beverages. For more than 30 years engineers have been working on an affordable technology to read and understand the composition of ambient air in place. Over the past years, low - cost solid - state gas sensors became available on the market. However, they not only drift over time but also suffer from cross-sensitivities and dependency on environmental conditions. In this talk, I will summarize the state of the technology, and discuss my recent research results and experience in the field. I will present solutions to the following major challenges of building networked sensing systems based on low-cost gas sensors: (1) low signal selectivity and how to improve it by constructing coherent sensor arrays, and (2) poor signal stability and inherent regular sensor re-calibration, possibly over multiple hops.
Biografia
Olga Saukh is an assistant professor at TU Graz, Institute for Technical Informatics and a scientist at Complexity Science Hub Vienna since 2017. She did her postdoctoral training at ETH Zurich in 2010-2016 working in the group headed by Prof. Lothar Thiele in the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory. Following her Bachelors in Applied Mathematics from the University of Kiev, Ukraine in 2002 and her Masters in Applied Computer Science from the University of Freiburg, Germany in 2004, She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn, Germany in 2009 under the guidance of Prof. Pedro José Marrón. She received the 2010 CONET Ph.D. Academic Award for her thesis "Efficient Algorithms for Structuring Wireless Sensor Networks". Her research focuses on developing, analyzing and optimizing algorithms for cyber-physical systems. She is interested in both theoretical beauty of algorithm engineering and in solving real-world challenges in environmental, social and industrial domains.