MSNBC Cosmic Log

March 4, 2008

By Alan Boyle

...

Sensors on the ocean floor
Microsoft is participating along with the University of Washington and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in a program called Trident, which is developing a sensor system for studying the Pacific Ocean's active seafloor. Trident meshes with wider efforts known as Project Neptune and the Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Eventually, scientists could be watching the ocean floor remotely with HDTV cameras, seismometers, sonar and other scientific instruments - with all the data flowing back to land via a fiber-optic network.

"Once you have thousands of sensors, how do you process all that data?" said University of Washington oceanographer Deborah Kelley, a member of the Neptune team.

That's where Microsoft is helping out, by devising the data flow management system that will let researchers hundreds of miles from shore interact in real time with their experiments. "It democratizes science," Microsoft Research's Roger Barga explained.

...