OCS Seminars
Dr. Barak Fishbain: Mathematical Programming Methods for Multi-Dimensional Air Quality Data Analysis
Understanding our environment and the variables that affect it, is essential to ensuring humanity’s continued survival on Earth. Environmental informatics uses computational analysis to, in part, predict changes in our environment. The NASA Earth Exchange is a platform that provides data sharing and computation services to the earth science community. Fishbain will discuss how signal processing and discrete optimization methods of Wireless Distributed Environmental Sensing Networks (WDESN) can be used to assess air quality.
Abstract:
Continuous in situ monitoring of the environment is an essential component in assessing environmental indicators. Air, water and land characteristics and quality, and their change over time is fundamental to most environmental applications. However, quantifying changes in environmental indicators over time is a most challenging task as their changes take place on different spatial and temporal scales. Local system characteristics and behavior affect overall system, while system level parameters govern the local scale processes. Recent sensory and communication technological developments have led to the emergence of Wireless Distributed Environmental Sensing Networks (WDESNs) that consist of Micro-Sensory-Units (MSUs), mainly in air and atmospheric assessments. These allow the study of fundamental processes in the environment in a new way. Considering the sheer amount of data and its diversity, arises the need for algorithms for processing and fusing these heterogeneous data – thus a new field has emerged – Enviromatics, i.e., environmental informatics. While MSUs present unprecedented tool for dense environmental monitoring, they are inaccurate. This inaccuracy has to be accounted for by algorithms when analyzing the data.
This talk will give an overview on some of the projects held in the Technion Enviromatics Lab (TechEL). These projects employ signal processing and discrete optimization methods for assessing air, utilizing WDESNs’ measurements. The focus of the talk will be three pioneering studies that explore the usage of WDESN in field deployments for assessing air quality in an intra-urban scale; mobile deployment; interpolation and handling missing information in air-quality data through sparse sensing.
Biography:
Barak Fishbain is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Civil & Environmental Engineering in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Prior to his arrival to the Technion, Fishbain served as an associate director at the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California (USC) and did his post-doctoral studies at the department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) in the University of California at Berkeley. Fishbain’s research focuses on Enviromatics, a new research field which aims at devising mathematical programming methods for machine understanding of trends and behaviors of built and natural environments. This includes environmental distributed sensing, road safety and traffic data realization, and structural health networks.
