Last night, the AMIS Mobile Special Interest Group convened. This session had as objective to explore the many different mobile agents and devices that we encounter, the types of signals, information and functions that are relevant with these various agents and the impact their inclusion in the mobile sphere of our customers has on the enterprise applications and architecture.

Our guest speaker – Rolf Hut of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences – did an excellent job of introducing a new class of mobile agents with his presentation on hydro-meteorological stations. He even had us all build rain-sensors, from easily accessible and very cheap materials. 10 minutes of super-glueing, soldering and kindergarten-level handcrafting was all it took for 6 teams to create a sensor that could be connected to a laptop to register simple signals.

From this very practical example, it was not hard to envisage a wide network with hundreds or thousands of devices that report findings – to be processed by the backend infrastructure.

See Rolf presenting on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh7GDD3Ssr8&feature=player_embedded#at=44.

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