Profs. Ugur Cetintemel and John Jannotti have been selected to receive one of Brown's highly competitive Salomon Awards. The $24,000 grant will support work on autonomous sensing and actuation applications. These applications will use sensors to observe the world around them and process the data they gather to reach conclusions and make decisions, and use actuators to affect the world on the basis of those decisions, all potentially without any human involvement.

Autonomous applications significantly extend the scope of today's sensor networks, which are used primarily to ease data collection for offline analysis by humans. The goal ...