 said we are the environmental sensing cluster and we're we're going to just give you a very brief introduction of the cluster today and a couple of highlights on projects and people that are inside the cluster. What we do is actually quite a bit wider than what you're going to hear from us today on but you know only a couple of people were really able to come in and give these presentations so I'm thankful to them and I'll introduce them in just a moment so what we'd like to present are just some of the issues regarding quality assurance for network sensor network systems and and some of the practices that we're developing to try to get a better handle on long-term system maintenance for data quality and we'll touch on some of the quality control issues although our main cluster QC participants the QC experts in the cluster weren't able to make it today so we'll be a little bit light on things like quality control algorithms but I think you'll get a sense for kind of where we're taking a lot of these issues by the end of the presentation so with that I'm going to find out if I can switch slides yes so the internet of things we can think about this is sensor technologies for earth and environmental sciences it's really been revolutionary in how we do our science for things like climate and hydrology and biology ecology and these sorts of things over the last oh let's say 10 to 15 years and it's becoming I would say that that curve is is steepening it's becoming less expensive to get into the scale in terms of number of devices that you can purchase and attempt to support is quite large and so at this point what we have is the ability for almost anyone to get into earth sensing in some way or another using observations that are measuring kind of direct direct to digital so no more transcribing in an unattended fashion and this allows you to measure many things which is really going to change our views on earth processes and the science of the science itself I'm I've been able to use to great effect this IOT revolution for mountain climate and paleo climate sciences my own research and I know it's true for many people in other fields however there are a number of risks that come along with this and and these risks are really kind of the issues that this cluster formed over several years ago and that is that you know we can buy the devices but we don't know how to manage the data and necessarily manage these devices long term and so there are a lot of different ways that we can get bad data but still have data in a file and gives us a maybe a false perception of accuracy there's also this issue of long-term degradation of systems and whether or not we can properly assess quality over time and then of course there is this issue that if all the data are digital there is the greater potential for those data to become vaporware and so this this concept of data being generated at large scale but also being lost at large scale is very real and we're concerned about being able to capture data and the more importantly the metadata supporting the operations in a way that has some persistence so those are some of the main issues the sales pitch to people who don't really know about in viral sensing is have you ever experienced a graph like this in your own science with gaps or bad values and this sort of thing if you have does it frustrate you and are you planning on purchasing and deploying more sensors and if the answer is yes this has happened to you and no you don't like it you should join our cluster or at least join the equivalent cluster in Australia as part of your your program down there now in terms of the cluster itself we're an open group of scientists so most of us have a background in some kind of environmental science overlaid with technology and we have people again that range across all all sorts of fields but most of us are involved either in data management or information management in some way or the network managed the physical network itself the management of the sensors and telemetry systems and that sort of thing some of us are PIs some of us aren't and so we have quite a range of experience across the cluster the cluster developed a best practices document that we sort of finalize the first version in 2014 and that we've left is kind of a living document that the community continue to edit as practices and technology moves forward and we're really focused on all of these issues of how can we move generally earth science and environmental science forward that use in situ sensing with sensors in place so we're not really covering remote sensing or anything like that we're really interested in in situ sensing and the projects that we work on inside of the cluster include things like tool development whether it's software tools or hardware tools as you'll see today we collaborate and share and monthly calls where we get together we also meet every year at the ESIP summer some of us go to the ESIP winter meeting as well and we also are very open for students or people that are just getting into the field because we we know that you know the the younger crowd brings a lot of cool ideas and new technology with them that we can then help guide them and and assist with maybe the strategic scientific methodology but then they can they can come up with new and interesting ways to do this earth sensing and so we welcome students and we're always glad to have them so here's just a screenshot of the main ESIP Wiki website for our cluster and there's a number of links to the best practices documentation on here as well as schedule and history of our telecons and that sort of thing if we look to the just very quickly though many of you are probably too far away from the screen to see but the contributor section which is the lower right corner shows kind of the original population of the cluster when it was first started and those folks that work very hard on the best practices document and when you look at their descriptions in terms of where they're from you'll see that it's mostly a US NSF LT ER personnel that it that it spent lots of time and still do on generating and managing data from sensor networks so there's kind of a rich history of doing this in many different environments and across many different fields of expertise so today we're going to give you some brief highlights and I don't I don't think I heard Vasu check in I'll just pause really fast and see if our second speaker Vasu has made it to the call from the EPA Vasu are you there perhaps not that's going to be too bad if he doesn't make it but sometimes things happen so so our projects and highlights that we're going to give you today are from Mike Daniels from the National Center for Atmospheric Research the Earth Observations Laboratory and he's going to talk about a project of his that deals with live streaming data or at least streaming sensor data and cloud hosted web interaction and then Paul Selleckort who is a recent PhD graduate from SUNY New York and he's going to talk about a end-to-end sensor workflow company that he's starting up and then at the end I'll go over some quality assurance practices inside of my own network in Nefcan so to begin with