Description:
Recent technological advancements in materials science and bioengineered systems have made inexpensive, powerful, and ubiquitous sensing a reality. Examples range from truly smart airframes and self-evaluating buildings and infrastructure for natural hazard mitigation to large-scale weather forecasting, self-organizing energy systems, and smart devices that self-assemble into networks leading to the first electronic nervous system that connects the Internet back to the physical world. New detection technologies that overcome barriers of time, scale, materials, and environment, and emphasize self-calibration, selectivity, and sensitivity are solicited. Techniques for establishing a hierarchy for data from multi-sensor platforms; newer modalities for transduction (e.g. time-based measurements for pressure and acceleration); packaging interfaces for sensor-to-outside world; cost-effective, cheap, high-throughput post-manufacturing calibration (trimming, biasing, offset correcting); traceability through built-in secure tagging from component through packaging to end-use; automation and miniaturization; and sensor systems for situational awareness are of interest. Sensor types of interest include mechanical sensors for dead-reckoning, touch and tactile sensors, failure prediction, autonomous cars; optical/image sensors for proximity, medical diagnostics, retinal implants, biomimetic, and particulates; smell sensors – environmental safety, food quality control, noninvasive health monitoring; asset tags; and other types of sensors such as chemical, proximity, magnetic, current/voltage, light, radiation, accelerometer/gyroscopes, cloud sensors, and biosignals (e.g. ECG, EMG, PPG, EEG).
In the area of sensor devices and signal processing, proposals are sought in new sensing modalities (sensing physics/chemistry, target specific); self-powered (power harvesting) and energy efficient; sensors for extreme environments; sensor fabrication techniques such as 3D printing and self-assembly; sensor signal read out, conditioning, and processing; and biodegradable sensors. For sensor systems and algorithms, tomographic processing, 3D array, autonomous sensing, sensor fusion, and remote sensing parametric inversion are of interest.
