We have been working heads down for the past few months on a new EC FP7 project called SENSEI. The goal of SENSEI is to provide the real-time sensor and actuator dimension of next generation network and service infrastructures. Or as the project website puts it:

In order to realise the vision of Ambient Intelligence in a future network and service environment, heterogeneous wireless sensor and actuator networks (WS&AN) have to be integrated into a common framework of global scale and made available to services and applications via universal service interfaces. SENSEI creates an open, business driven architecture that fundamentally addresses the scalability problems for a large number of globally distributed WS&A devices. It provides necessary network and information management services to enable reliable and accurate context information retrieval and interaction with the physical environment. By adding mechanisms for accounting, security, privacy and trust it enables an open and secure market space for context-awareness and real world interaction.

The tangible outputs of the SENSEI project include:

1) plug and play architecture / protocol
2) open service interface
3) efficient WS&AN island solutions (targeting 5nJ/bit)
4) pan European test platform

Our focus has been on supporting the scenario development and hopefully over the next month or two I will post some the scenarios that we have been finding most interesting. The themes we have been focusing on include Smart City, Healthcare and Transport.

The project fits under Future Internet - ICT Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures