Harish Chintakunta, a graduate student in the ECE Department, contributed a winning poster presentation at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Basic Research Program Technical Review, October 19-30, 2009.

His research focuses on Topological Analysis of sensor networks and their measurements with applications in detecting and localizing failures. The novelty of the work lies in the application of mathematically abstract subject of Topology into solving some very difficult practical problems in sensor networks.  The salient feature of nodes in a sensor network is their locally limited knowledge and communication capability. Because of this, ensuring robustness and reliability of the network as a whole becomes a challenging task. When it comes to inferring global features of a network, Topology is a very effective tool. Furthermore, topological analysis lends itself to be executed in a distributed manner which makes it particularly useful in the field of sensor networks.

"We assign high dimensional vector spaces to the union of coverage of the sensor network and investigate the presence of holes by analyzing the ranks of certain linear operators defined on the vector spaces," says Chintakunta.  He also presents an efficient, fast and distributed algorithm to localize the holes in the coverage.