Videos

Mathematics Making Sense of Sensors

January 22, 2009
Abstract
Sensor networks are poised to impact society in fundamental ways analogous to the impact of the networked personal computers. The rapid development of small-scale sensors coupled with wireless ad hoc networking capability foreshadows a day when our physical surroundings will wake up with sensory data, assuming it does not drown in the data first. In this lecture, Professor Ghrist will describe a recent calculus for sensor network data, whose origins lie in the century-old theory of algebraic topology. Sums and simplices, holes and homologies, counting and calculus, all converge to a tool for helping the walls to wake up.