Best Demo Award at MDM 2009 for Ali Salehi, Karl Aberer and Sebastian
At the International Conference on Mobile Data Management Systems (MDM 2009), the demo "GSN, Middleware for Streaming World" by Ali Salehi (EPFL), Mehdi Riahi (Isfahan University of Technology, Iran), Karl Aberer and Sebastien Michel (EPFL) won the Best Demo Award.
In this demo, they demonstrated some of the major features of their stream processing middleware to a large number of people and showed some of the major features of their stream Global Sensor Networks (a.k.a.) GSN is a software project which started as a pre-doctoral project in 2004-2005 and ever since more and more people are interested in using it. Interestingly, the software is not only used by the research community around the world (e.g., Ireland, Australia, ...) but also used by government agencies in Switzerland (e.g., Eidgenössischen Forschungsanstalt WSL; slf.ch , ...) and enterprises around the world (E.g., Microsoft Research Redmond, Swisscom,...).
The major feature of the software is it simplicity combined by its expressiveness power. Simply put, one can very quickly and without any extensive training create a very complex data processing chains. This system's unique property is the flexibility that it provides to the users. On the hardware side, using GSN, one can use any hardware with our platform for capturing data. On the software side, using GSN, one doesn't need a custom application to be built, instead one can build one's own applications using our visual interface or even a simple text editor.
This software is developed at the LSIR lab and released to general public under the GPL license (open source). As of today, the software is applied to Environmental Science (gsn.sf.net), Finance (nextick.org) and surveillance/RFID/Network-Camera applications.
As of today our software is used in the context of projects in which EPFL involved (Government, enterprises inside/outside Switzerland) in addition to other users which found the software interesting for their own needs.