Now that Sensors Expo 2013 is over and the dust has had a chance to settle, I thought I'd elaborate on some of this year's stand-out features. This year's theme for the show was "Sensor Technologies Driving Solutions," giving a hat tip to the fast-growing diversity of sensor applications being developed.
At last week's Sensors Expo, we gathered together to learn and connect with our peers and to find out who had won the annual Best of Sensors Expo Awards. Where the original incarnation of the Best of Sensors Expo Award program recognized novel products; this year saw us expanding the awards program to consider both novel sensor applications with the Application Award and the engineers who continually advance the sensor industry through their efforts with the Engineers of the Year Award. The winners exemplify the qualities that make the sensor industry such a vibrant and robust one; let me introduce you to them!
In 2013 we expanded the Best of Sensors Expo Awards program to recognize innovative sensor and sensor-related products, novel sensor applications, and the engineering teams working behind the scenes to advance the sensor industry; here are our winners.
One of the characteristics of sensors of which I am most fond is their versatility; a color sensor designed for the consumer or industrial automation market ends up built into agricultural machinery to check how ripe the grain is at harvest. An aerospace sensor ends up being used when drilling for oil. The increase in the variety of sensors available has spawned an explosion in creative sensor applications.
There's an excellent recent article in the Boston Globe, written by Courtney Humphries and titled "The too-smart city" that looks at the concept of smart cities and asks how the influx of smart city technologies can change how cities operate and whether some of those changes are desirable in the long term.
The theme for this year's Sensors Expo is sensor technology driving solutions. Our theme reflects the power sensors have to change our work, our play, and our world and our two keynotes illustrate just what happens when technology and inspiration meet to achieve solutions, whether interacting with our environment (and having it interact with us) or visiting another planet entirely.
We're mere weeks away from Sensors Expo 2013 and I thought I'd take this opportunity to call out some of the particularly exciting offerings that are new for 2013. This year we welcome ARM, Appliance Design Advantage Business Media, Gases & Instrumentation, and Evaluation Engineering who join the MEMS Industry Group as our collaboration partners. In addition, this year the RTC Group will be launching its Intelligent Systems Conference & Pavilion (ISCP) on the show floor. And, finally, the IPSO Alliance will be introducing its first global IP Innovation Challenge for the next generation Internet of Things (IoT).
This month's collection of clever and useful research and development stories includes a system to gather more and better data on how explosions affect soldiers and a continuous UV sensor.
Sensor journalism is the idea of journalists using sensors to gather their own data to inform their news reporting. With the confluence of interest in sensors; Big Data; the Internet of Things; and cheap, user-friendly, yet powerful open-source hardware such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi that let you build your own devices, many people are waking up to the idea that monitoring their environment is something that they can do, too.
This month we have a tiny timing chip that incorporates inertial sensors, a project to weigh trucks while they're driving, and a novel sensor cable that enables quicker, cheaper perimeter protection.
