Computerworld Horizon Award
Sun SPOTs and Neuromancer

August 29, 2006 - Congratulations to Sun Labs Projects Neuromancer and SunSPOTs! Each project was awarded one of the 10 Honorable Mention Awards in the second annual Computerworld Horizon Awards.

Project Neuromancer's research in large-scale distributed telemetry was awarded honorable mention in the following category: Manages burgeoning needs for information storage and disaster recovery in today's regulated world.

Project SunSPOTs' award for basic improvements in hardware or software architecture that enhance processing or communication for a wide variety of applications resulted from research into developing wireless sensor and transducer applications built with Java.

The Computerworld Horizon Awards were established in 2005 to provide visibility for cutting-edge technologies from research labs and emerging companies. Computerworld received over 200 nominations for this year's category - innovative technologies that meet the needs of enterprise IT.

Each nomination was required to have a technology that met one of this year's criteria.

For more information on the Horizon Awards and descriptions of all the winning projects, read the full Computerworld Horizon Awards 2006 Honorees article.

Sun Microsystems Laboratories Winners:

Project Sun SPOT simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications, enabling developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication and familiar Integrated Development Environments, such as NetBeans, to write code. The portability makes it simpler to migrate applications among platforms, enabling developers to build new wireless sensors devices using off- the-shelf hardware components.

More information:
www.sunspotworld.com
Video

Neuromancer Team Photo: From left to right, front row: Ann Wollrath, Bob Sproull, Tim Blackman and Jane Loizeaux. Back row: Karl Haberl, Jim Waldo and Michael Warres. Photo credit: Heidi Peabody

Sun Labs is researching large-scale distributed telemetry with a focus on how a system could be created to gather, anonymize and assess vast amounts of health data from wide deployments of sensors. Neuromancer's goal is to enable the collection and use of information gathered from medical sensors deployed over the scope of a medical practice, a hospital, a metropolitan area or an entire population. These sensors will be deployed all the time, allowing constant data gathering of basic medical information. The information will also be kept for the lifetime of the patient, 80-plus years, meaning that the system itself will exist for a time scale not usually thought of in computer systems.

More information:
Neuromancer Project