Abstract

 

Efficient and affordable computing, progress in microelectronics and sensors, and the emergence of low power wireless networks have made geospatial sensor networks for agriculture, water, and the environment an increasingly attractive proposition.  I will discuss two projects we have been involved in. First, I will discuss results from a multi-year study undertaken in India to develop techniques for geospatial mapping of water quality in Indian rivers. I will describe the technology and our experiences. In the second, I will describe our work in deploying buried wireless sensor networks for soil measurement and agriculture in a working farm in the Chicagoland area (at Fermilabs) that has now been in continuous operation for about 1.5 years.  Adequate high resolution soil data is needed in order to develop accurate models for agriculture and terrestrial ecology and I will show that low power wireless sensor networks can be a promising approach for gathering such data provided cost sensitive sensors can be deployed.  In this context I will also describe some of our ongoing and planned work in expanding to other farms within Illinois as part of our activities in the NSF-USDA funded Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute. In both cases I will also talk about the “real life” experiences from operating such networks in the field, the importance of data collection and curation from the physical scientist’s point of view, and the role that hardware technologies can play in making this approach cost efficient.

 

Bio

 

Supratik Guha is a professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Labs. Prior to this he was at IBM Research where he last served as Director of Physical Sciences till 2015.  He is a materials scientist, with research interests in materials and systems for future information processing, including sensor networks. He has worked extensively in the area of semiconductor systems for microelectronics. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of Southern California and a B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1985. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, and a Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Fellow.