Keynote: Of towers, tunnels, animals, and wireless sensor networks: From research to the real world — And back

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been around for more than a decade. Although the research community has become increasingly aware of the importance of real-world deployments, however, the latter represent a tiny fraction of the literature on WSNs. Moreover, of these few real-world experiences, those reporting about long-term, operational systems are themselves a small fraction of the total. In this talk, I will present past and ongoing research from my research group (http://d3s.disi.unitn.it), revolving around real-world WSN deployments targeting real needs. These include: the long-term structural health monitoring of a medieval tower; the closed-loop control of adaptive lighting in an operational road tunnel; the understanding of social behavior of wildlife. In these experiences, we started by applying pre-existing results and tools. However, the real world is often more creative than researchers, and it pushed our research agenda in unexpected directions. The talk gives a brief account of the research roller-coaster we experienced in the last few years.