Research: Aspen

Database Group

ORCHESTRA
Aspen
Tukwila
Peer-to-Peer
Data Integration

Aspen

Managing heterogeneity and approximation in stream- and sensor-based systems

With the advent of low-cost wireless sensing devices, it is predicted that the world will quickly move to one in which many environments are instrumented for reasons of security, scientific monitoring, environmental control, entertainment, etc. There are many fundamental questions about how to develop applications in this emerging sensor network world. Perhaps the most important are how to support rich, complex applications that may have confidentiality requirements, heterogeneous types of sensors, different connectivity levels, and timing constraints.

The Aspen (Abstraction-based Sensor Programming at Penn) project focuses on the challenges in developing a programming environment and runtime system for this style of environment.

The two problems we are initially addressing are reasoning about system-level sensor network application security, even in the presence of possible node-level compromise, and developing a programming model that handles heterogeneous data stream types and sensor capabilities.

Publications

• Madhukar Anand, Eric Cronin, Micah Sherr, Matt Blaze, Zachary Ives, Insup Lee. Sensor Network Security: More Interesting Than You Think, Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, July 2006.
• Madhukar Anand, Zachary Ives, Insup Lee. Quantifying Eavesdropping Vulnerability in Sensor Networks, VLDB Workshop on Data Management for Sensor Networks, August 2005.

Team Members

• Prof. Insup Lee
• Prof. Zachary Ives
• Prof. Lyle Ungar
• Prof. Matt Blaze
• Prof. Sudipto Guha
• Prof. Dean Foster (Wharton)
• Svilen Mihaylov
• Madhukar Anand
• Micah Sherr
• Eric Cronin

Alumni

• Aaron Evans
• Tak Man Ma
• Ted Paulakis

Funded in part by a seed grant from ISTAR, the Penn Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and Response.