The National Science Foundation in the U.S. recently awarded $130 million to tackle information technology research (ITR) for national priorities. One of these awards went to the University of Washington and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to design the cyberinfrastructure required to use and automate undersea sensor networks. With this $3.9 million award, "oceanographers will soon be able to sit in their labs ashore and communicate with instruments in the water at ocean observatories around the world," says the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The University of Washington adds "that infrastructure will be a prototype for the use and automation of undersea sensor networks -- both delivery of data from sensors and the control of sensors and networks from land -- and will assist in designing sensor networks for conducting research in other remote and hostile environments." Read more...
Before going further, I must admit that the researchers found a nice acronym for this project: LOOKING stands for "Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid."
Here is what says Alan Chave, the principal WHOI scientist in the LOOKING project.
"The ability to have instruments on the seafloor, the ocean observatory infrastructure, communicate with users on shore automatically and seamlessly is critical to the success of ocean observatories," Chave said of the project. "LOOKING will help us implement the ocean observatory networks we will need in other remote and hostile environments in the ocean. Scientists around the world will be able to access data from specific instruments on different observatories linked by this growing global network, making much more information available to scientists, teachers and students, and the public. Internet access to the sea, or at least much more of it than we now have, will become routine."
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This is an "illustration of the ITR project awarded to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Johns Hopkins University and MIT. Led by Hanumant Singh of Woods Hole, the team will work to enable multiple autonomous vehicles to be deployed from a single ship. This will dramatically increase the scientific community's ability to gather information from deep-sea surveys." (Credit: E. Paul Oberlander, WHOI) |
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"This functional block diagram of a generic ocean observatory system extends from the 'wet side' at left to a shore-based observatory control facility at the center and onto the Internet and users on the right." (Credit: University of Washington) |
The University of Washington gives other details about the LOOKING project.
The LOOKING project is emblematic of a growing focus on global, coastal and regional-scale observatories since the NSF initiated its Ocean Observatories Initiative in 2001. That federally-funded initiative is scheduled to be funded in fiscal 2006 with $245 million over five years. Those and existing ocean observatories will be managed and operated by another NSF creation -- the Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks, or ORION, program. ORION coordinates the science, technology, education and outreach of the emerging network of science-driven ocean observatories.
Working with other NSF-funded organizations, LOOKING will develop cyberinfrastructure to link multiple coastal or regional observatories, including the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observatory which will provide real-time data from its existing sensors. New web services, networking and control prototypes will also be tested in conjunction with several new observatories to be constructed over the next five years (all of which, like ORION, derive their acronyms from heavenly bodies)
And they really found nice acronyms: MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System), VENUS (Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea) or NEPTUNE (North East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments).
If these researchers want one day to expand their horizons, they might be welcome by some marketing departments...
Sources: National Science Foundation news release, September 30, 2004; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution news release, October 6, 2004; University of Washington news release, September 30, 2004
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