Involving Undergraduate Students in SoS Engineering

Undergraduate Computer Science Department students at the University of Hawaii at Hilo participated in design, development, and deployment of a low-cost system of systems to collect and report near real-time field data from various sources including sensors linked by satellite or directly connected to the Internet. The project has been implemented as a working prototype for investigating an integrated model for environmental research, which concentrates on the application spatial, and temporal analysis techniques to large-scale ecological data sets and includes satellite imagery and ground-based sensor data. The design is extensible so that it can accommodate data sharing among diverse groups such as marine science, biological, geological, and climate control researchers. A Web interface is provided to visualize data collected from isolated geographical stations using satellite technology. Students experimented with alternative implementations of interface equipment using custom field programmable gate array circuits and stamp processors.