Special Sessions

Organizers: Aliou Diallo (University Côte d'Azur), Philippe Le Thuc (University Côte d'Azur)

Session Description:
Recent advances in the world of microelectronics and wireless technologies have resulted in the development of small sensors with processing capabilities and wireless communication modes. The interest of wireless sensors continues to grow as a highly promising technology for the present and the future. The devices that support this concept are small enough to be used in many areas such as medicine with patient tracking, the environment for forest fire detection, monitoring volcanic or seismic activities, or development of smart homes. One of the vital components of this kind of devices, is the antenna which can be used as radio link, sensing element or even as energy harvester. Despite the volume constraints of the sensor, the antenna must remain efficient regardless of the technology used (RFID, IoT, M2M ...) or be smart to minimize energy consumption. This session will be dedicated to the presentation of innovative antennas for wireless sensors. These can range from miniaturization of antennas integrated in sensors for various applications to smart antennas for minimizing power consumption in a Wireless Sensors Network.

Session Topics:
Bio-implantable Antenna
Passive RFID Tag Antenna for Sensors
Miniature Antenna for IoT Applications
Smart Antenna for WSN

Organizers: Nathalie Mitton (Inria), Antoine Gallais (University of Strasbourg/Inria)

Session Description:
These last years have witnessed the flourishment of sensor and sensor network technologies and advances in electronics have allowed their availability at low cost for all. New applications have emerged and a large variety of theoretical and practical tools have been developed to help
researchers assess the performance of their solutions. Still, many challenges arise that deserve fine testing and validation before a large scale deployment. For this purpose, several experimentation facilities have been deployed worldwide in order to evaluate IoT solutions in general and wirelesssensor networks in particular. Most famous are FIT (https://fit-equipex.fr) and its wireless sensor component IoT LAB (https://www.iot-lab.info), FlockLab (https://gitlab.ethz.ch/tec/public/flocklab), Indrya (indriya.comp.nus.edu.sg), Wisebed (https://github.com/wisebed), to name a few.
The focus of this special session is to provide a unique opportunity for researchers and developers to share experience and user feedbacks in using large scale wireless sensor network experimentation testbeds while exchanging tips and ideas on implementation and available tools. We also aim at fostering discussions about the relevance of such facilities to bridge the gap between research propositions and target applications and deployments.

Session Topics:
Testbed validation of wireless sensor applications
Monitoring of wireless sensor network applications
Large scale wireless sensor network experimentations
Comparative study of wireless sensor network testbeds
Features of experimentation testbeds (e.g., mobility, heterogeneity)
Reproducibility of evaluation campaigns

Organizers: Alain Pegatoquet (University Côte d'Azur), Benoit Miramond (University Côte d'Azur)

Session Description:
The future of cars is to integrate more and more autonomous driving capability. Introducing such a capability in cars is challenging in terms of system complexity as it requires increasingly complex sensing and computing technologies as well as additional focus in reliability. Autonomous vehicles are also increasingly using sensor fusion to combine multiple sensor inputs (radar, camera, LIDAR…) to better interpret objects and obstacles.
This special session will welcome any contribution concerning sensing offering levels of reaction and anticipation needed on the road, hardware/software system built with proper reliability and redundancy and system optimized for operating in battery-powered vehicles. This special session will also welcome invited speakers from industry to discuss industrial trends and open issues in the design of automotive systems.

Session Topics:
Sensors for Automotive Applications (assisted or fully autonomous driving)
New sensing capabilities (e.g. biomimetic sensors)
Hardware and software architectures for automotive applications
Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) for automotive
Sensor fusion
Machine learning in the automotive domain
High-performance computing for computer vision and machine learning applications
Sensor systems to increase vehicle robustness, redundancy and safety
Surround car sensing (camera, radar, lidar, etc; long to short range)
Power consumption aspects

Organizers: Michele Magno (ETH Zurich), Domenico Balsamo (University of Southampton)

Session Description:
Today sensors technologies are gaining popularity, with people surrounded by many sensor devices. Low power sensing devices, pushed by the wave of Internet of Things (IoT), are becoming increasingly complex systems that combine hardware, microcontrollers, sensors, memory, energy, and data storage, software, firmware, and connectivity in a myriad of ways. For this reason sensors devices are becoming more and more "smart" processing the data close to the sensors self rather than send the raw data remotely. Low power design aims to build power efficient sensing systems to provide continuous data monitoring, acquisition, processing, and classification of the data in-site. This Special Session emphasizes the challenges, issues, and opportunities in the research, design, and engineering of energy efficient sensing, focusing on techniques, strategies, and algorithms applied to real-application achieving intelligent sensors; also, this Special Session welcomes contributions in deployments, in-field tests, and measurements of low-power devices. All submissions must be original and not previously published.

Session Topics:
Machine learning on microcontrollers
Low power smart sensors
Self-sustaining sensors
Smart sensors for long-terms monitoring
Energy harvesting for smart sensors
Low power signal processing

Organizers: Elisabetta Farella (ICT Center, FBK), Amy Lynn Murphy (ICT Center, FBK)

Session Description:
Designing smart cities does not mean filling it with new technologies. It means offering solutions supported by novel advanced technologies addressing the ever-increasing number of urban challenges towards making more sustainable cities and improving quality of life. For this reason, all relevant stakeholders coming from the community as a whole must be involved and when possible must act as co-creators of the final solution.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that seems to exploit the potential of millions of sensors and actuators instrumenting environments, people and objects. This special session focuses on wireless smart things, seeking to highlight their capacity to deliver embedded and distributed intelligence by exploiting on-board processing, smart sensing and actuation, low-power and multi-hop communication in an energy efficient manner.

Session Topics:
Smart sensors and actuators
Context recognition on embedded systems
Smart urban areas (i.e. public places, green areas, etc.)
Embedded audio processing for outdoor environments
Low-power vision sensors and signal processing for IoT
Low-power communication protocols
Multi-hop / low-power / distributed communication
Communication technologies for smart cities (WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee and 2G/3G/4G, SigFox, NBIoT, 6LowPAN, Neul, LoRaWAN,...)
Identification technologies (NFC, RFid…)
Wake-up radios or other novel wireless communication technologies
Application of wearables for smart community
People and group localization / tracking / proximity detection in smart cities and smart communities
Application and deployment experiences

Organizers: Vincenzo Marletta (University of Catania), Bruno Andò (University of Catania)

Session Description:
Direct printing technologies have been intensively studied because they represent a fast and low cost strategy that could replace, in specific contexts, traditional fabrication techniques (e.g. sputtering and lithography) of devices and sensors both in mass production for industries, and in the rapid prototyping for research and academic laboratories. Consequently, there is an extremely vivid interest on this subject both in the scientific and in the industrial community.
Recently, alternative realizations of low cost devices and sensors have emerged; of these,
flexible structures underpinned by plastic or polymeric substrates show great promise since they are compatible with direct printing technologies. 
Among direct printing technologies, inkjet printing seems to be a very promising solution for
the rapid prototyping of low cost sensors.In spite of the numerous results available, there is still a large need for further research efforts and for novel solutions.
We invite therefore original research papers on this subject with the goal to contribute to this
area through a vibrant arena where novel ideas on converging subjects for the general topic
of Printed Sensors will be confronted, exchanged and set up a help in setting.

Session Topics:
Overview of state of the art on Printed Sensors
Development of novel Printed Sensors and Actuators
Low cost printing solutions
Flexible sensors
Modeling of Printed Sensors
Applications of Flexible and Printed Sensors and Actuators
Contacting solutions for Printed Sensors

Organizers: Olivier Romain (ETIS Lab), Claudine Gehin (INSA Lyon)