If you watch a group of boys playing outside, chances are, at some point, one boy is going to leap on top of another boy. There will be a lot of yelling and ferocious roars, but also lots of grins. Other boys will try to pull the first boy off or grab on, too, and they’ll all end up in a pile on the ground.Ā Sometimes play fighting and wrestling result in injuries that warrant a trip to a hospital’s emergency room.

 

In a panic to help their children, parents rush to get car keys, insurance card, and maybe put ice on the injury as they make their way to the emergency room. Many emergency rooms have wait times up to an hour or more before a doctor can see patients.Ā  But imagine, having the technology on-hand to help you determine the closest hospital emergency room, with the shortest wait time.

 

This technology is currently being researched by Dr. Ahmed Abelmoamen Ahmed Assistant Professor at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU), who has been actively involved in several research projects, including Internet of Things (IoT) distributed applications, resource coordination for concurrent systems, efficient mobile sensing. With sensors becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there is a tremendous potential for distributed sensor-based services, which can take advantage of the data collected by these sensors.

 

Consider a recommendation system for medical emergencies, which advises people on which hospital to go based on real-time data about delays experienced by people currently at the various hospital emergencies. Consider other services, such as one of a public assistance service where a police officer requires people in certain vicinities to provide a live video feed of their scene.

 

Such services could also be useful in efforts to coordinate rescue efforts following major natural disasters, such as the hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017 at Texas and Florida, respectively. Emergency management agencies could use such services to gain insight into the situation on the ground. Increasingly, sensed data could also inform decisions to activate actuators to carry out tasks automatically. A growing number of home automation technologies offer good examples of such capability. These services rely on the state of the context in which devices are located such as geographical location.

 

Dr. Ahmed joined the Department of Computer Science at PVAMU in the Fall of 2017.Ā His research interests are in the fields of parallel and distributed systems with applications in domains such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Sensor-based Services. During his Ph.D., he built a number of mechanisms to support programming of mobile services, and formal models to understand them.

 

Dr. Ahmed is working on small- and large-scale projects to help individuals and industries to easily initiate and launch such services. Dr. Ahmed’s work has both foundational and experimental components. The experimental side of his research builds mechanisms to support programming of mobile and distributed sensing-based systems, prototypes them, and experimentally evaluates them. His foundational work is aimed at understanding principles underlying such systems and informing design and implementation decision about them. His research objective is to understand the properties of these systems and to design and implement novel mechanisms to improve the programmability and performance of these systems. Dr. Ahmed’s research was inspired by the Egyptian Revolution in 2011.

 

Dr. Ahmed expects the resulting ease of developing distributed sensor-based service to lead to a democratization of service industry, leading to a large number of ever more innovative IoT services. This will be achieved by reducing the initial investment required in setting up novel services. Also, Dr. Ahmed’s leading work addressing this challenge may interest researchers working on sensor-based services in the industry, which may lead to collaborations between PVAMU and IT companies. For instance, he is currently working with Bechtel Corporation on two projects related to his research area. These projects will minimize the risks to the environment and workers’ safety by deploying IoT services to inaccessible places such as underground pipes. Furthermore, his research will increase the research capability at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Internet of Things, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Concurrent Programming. Dr. Ahmed’s work has created new opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students in the STEM program at PVAMU to engage in research.

 

Author: Ā Maurice Perkins