Research interests

Dr. Silvia Nittel’s research interests are in database management systems, distributed computing, and data management in sensor networks, especially geosensor networks. She received her Ph.D. in 1994 from the Computer Science Department of the University of Zurich where she worked on high-performance storage techniques for extensible and object-oriented DBMS. She joined the UCLA Computer Science Department as postdoctoral researcher in 1995, and worked on high-performance integration platforms for heterogeneous spatial data. From 1998 to spring 2001, she was the Co-Director of the UCLA Data Mining Lab, and manager of a the NASA grant "ESP2NET". Her research focused on high performance, location-independent tools for scientific data mining and scientific collaboration.

Her current research focuses on extending database technology to support stationary and mobile sensor networks, especially geosensor networks. Her main research focus is database management strategies and in-network data collection in geosensor networks, and data management techniques to manage, storage, integrate and query continuous sensor data streams of various sensor devices in real-time. She is the cofounder of the conference series of "Geosensor Networks", author of 2 books on Geosensor Networks, and she is the director of the Geosensor Lab at the University of Maine. She is a recipient of a NSF Early CAREER award in 2005, and her current research is funded with grants from NSF, NGA and NASA. She serves on the executive committee of the Sensor Science, Engineering and Informatics IGERT at the University of Maine.

Publications

• G. Jin and S. Nittel, UDC: A self-adaptive uneven clustering protocol for dynamic sensor network, International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (MSN), Wuhan, China,13-15 December 2005.
• A. Nural, S. Nittel and S. Winter, Shared Ride Trips in Large Transportation Networks, In: Miller, H. (Ed.), Symposium on Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access, University of Utah, UT, November 2005.
• M. Duckham, S. Nittel and M. Worboys, Monitoring dynamic spatial fields using responsive geosensor networks, ACM-GIS 2005, Bremen, Germany, November 2005.
• In: Simonis, I. (Ed.), GI-Days 2005. Institute of Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Germany.
• S. Nittel, In-Network Spatial Query Estimation for Sensor Networks, Workshop on "Databases and Sensor Networks", Denki University, Tokyo, June 2005 (keynote)
• S. Nittel, Research Direction in Geosensor Networks, First South African Workshop on Sensor Web Enablement, Pretoria, 3-4 March 2005 (invited talk)
• S. Nittel, M. Duckham, and L. Kulik, Information Dissemination in Mobile Ad-hoc Geosensor Networks, Third International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2004), College Park, Maryland, October 2004,
• A. Stefanidis, and S. Nittel, Geosensor Networks, CRC Press, August 2004.
• S. Nittel, and Leung, K., Parallelizing Clustering of Geoscientific Data Sets using Data Streams, International Conference on "Scientific and Statistical Data Base Management" (SSDBM), Santorini, Greece, June, 2004.
• S. Winter and S. Nittel, Abstraction and Standardization in the Spatial Domain. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 17(8), Dec 2003.
• S. Nittel, G. Jin, Y. Shiraishi, In-Network Spatial Query Estimation in Sensor Networks, IEICE Transactions (A), Vol.J88-A, No.12, pp.1413-1421, December 2005
• G. Jin and S. Nittel, UDC: A self-adaptive uneven clustering protocol for dynamic sensor network, International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2006 (in press).
• S. Winter, and S. Nittel, Ad-hoc shared ride trip planning by mobile geosensor networks, International Journal of Geographic Information Science, 2006 (in press).
• G. Jin and S. Nittel, NED: Efficient Event Detection in Sensor Network, Workshop "Mobile Location-Aware Sensor Networks", in conjunction with Conference on "Mobile Data Management", Nara, Japan, May 13 2006.
• S. Nittel and R. de By (Editors), Proceedings of International ACM Symposium on “Geographic Information Systems” (ACM-GIS’06), Sheridan Publishers, Netherlands.
• S. Nittel, S. Winter, A. Nural, and T. Cao, Shared Ride Trip Planning using Geosensor Networks, In: H. Miller (Ed.), Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access, Springer, NL, 2007.
• A. Nural, S. Nittel, N. Trigoni, and N. Pettigrew, A model for motion pattern discovery in ocean drifter networks, Costal Environmental Sensing Networks Conference, Boston, MA, April 12-13 2007
• S. Nittel, N. Trigoni, K. Ferentinos, F. Neville, A. Nural, and N. Pettigrew, A drift-tolerant model for data management in ocean sensor networks, MobiDE'07, in conjunction with SIGMOD, Bejing, China, 2007
• G. Jin and S. Nittel, Towards Spatial Window Queries Over Continuous Phenomena in Sensor Networks, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Vol 19(4), pp. 559-571, April 2008
• Y.J. Jung, Y. K. Lee, D. G. Lee, K. H. Ryu, S. Nittel, Air Pollution Monitoring System using Geosensor Networks, International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Boston, MA, July 2008
• Y. J. Jung and S. Nittel, Geosensor Data Abstraction for Environmental Monitoring Applications, GIScience, Park City, Utah, September 2008 (accepted).
• C. Farah, C. Zhong, M. Worboys and S. Nittel, Detecting Toplogoical Change using Wireless Sensor Networks, GIScience, Park City, Utah, September 2008 (accepted).
• S. Nittel, A. Labrinidis, and A. Stefanidis, Advances in Geosensor Networks, Springer, LNCS 4540, 2008 (forthcoming).

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