Probabilistic Data Management for Pervasive Computing: The Data Furnace Project.

Abstract

The wide deployment of wireless sensor and RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) devices is one of the key enablers for next-generation pervasive computing applications, including large-scale environmental monitoring and control, context-aware computing, and “smart digital homes”. Sensory readings are inherently unreliable and typically exhibit strong temporal and spatial correlations (within and across different sensing devices); effective reasoning over such unreliable streams introduces a host of new data management challenges. The Data Furnace project at Intel Research and UC-Berkeley aims to build a probabilistic data management infrastructure for pervasive computing environments that handles the uncertain nature of such data as a first-class citizen through a principled framework grounded in probabilistic models and inference techniques. 1