Recent technological advancements in materials science, micro fabrication of MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), and bioengineered systems have made the dream of inexpensive, powerful, ubiquitous sensing a readily achievable reality. Examples range from truly smart airframes and self-evaluating buildings and infrastructure for natural hazard mitigation to large-scale weather forecasting and selforganizing energy systems. A common thread running through these, and all other applications of ubiquitous sensing, is the vast amounts of data generated, and a need to have the ubiquitous sensor networks process this data in order to return decisions and information. Sensor networks become a dynamic organism far more powerful and user-friendly than the traditional view of a sensor as a widget, an individual component that needs to be deployed, programmed, and interrogated. Therefore, the convergence of sensor technologies, communications, and computing has the potential to overcome barriers of time, scale, materials and environment. The National Workshop on Future Sensing Systems was held in Lake Tahoe, California, August 26-28, 2002, sponsored by the Sensors Technology Program of the NSF Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems (CMS), with co-sponsorship from DARPA, NIH, DOE, NIST, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, ARO, ARL, and NRL. The scope of this workshop encompassed discussions of research needs, current and emerging technologies, and efficacious partnerships required to develop and implement future sensing systems. The workshop was planned to stimulate synergistic ideas and directions generated by industrial, scientific and government participants, and to start planning a long-term road map for R&D projects related to emerging needs and technologies. Furthermore, this workshop started strategic partnerships among industry, scientific community, and government agencies that are developing innovative and cross-pollinating sensor systems capable of converting raw data into useful information about myriad environments. The workshop was designed to push the community to share and work together, not study the current state of the art. This gathering was not a place for the participants to give formal presentations about their research successes. The participants drove this workshop. The ideas, the concepts, and the research directions outlined in this paper were decided by all the participants. The workshop spawned numerous collaborations, proposals, and plans for future sensor research. It also proved that there are far more commonalities than differences in the challenges faced by a wide variety of researchers from the sensor community at large. Perhaps most importantly though, the workshop helped foster the strategic and targeted growth of that nascent community. The manuscript will first discuss the Workshop and its goals and organization, followed by an exposition of the research needs and directions of future growth in sensor-directed research. The final section discusses some proposed changes to how the research community might better organize to maximize the research output per dollar invested, and deliver more useful results. A list of defined abbreviations used in this paper is given by Appendix 1. Please note that the full word-for-word transcripts of the Workshop, as well as all the presentations, is freely available on-line at Http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/Programs/Geoengineering/sensors/.
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