Welcome to The Sound of Science from WNIJ and NIU STEAM. It’s a weekly series explaining important STEM concepts. Today’s host is Dr. Kristin Brynteson.
With me again today is Dr. Michael Papka, professor of computer science and a scientist at Argonne National Lab. So last time, we talked about supercomputers. Today, let's talk about the sensors scientists used to collect data. So, what is a software defined sensor network, and how can they advance scientific research?
That's a great question. I mean, we're seeing today with the kind of the Internet of things and low-cost sensors, our ability to deploy sensors, unlike we've ever before, and it's generating vast amounts of data and that data itself will help scientists do things that they've never done before. The other thing I think is really interesting right now is, you've taken these sensors in where we in the past have built a very purposeful instrument to do something specific, we can now put the sensors together in such a way that with software that the scientists write, do other things. And with that flexibility, we can have one instrument deployed that can look at a whole variety of things. On the NIU campus, we have a sensor deployed that has a bunch of different sensors in it, and we can look at are people using the crosswalk or not, but that same instrument can be reprogrammed to look at counting squirrels or how much trash is on the ground. And the real flexibility there is the software whatever you can imagine and write with software, you can program into this this instrument to do science.
So, the possibilities are endless. They are. Well thank you for joining us. And thank you for listening to The Sound of Science on WNIJ where you learn something new every day.
