Proceedings of the 13th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks

Welcome to the 13th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2014) in Berlin, Germany. IPSN is one of the flagship research conferences of the networked sensing and control community, and continues to serve as a major forum for cutting edge research results. In IPSN 2014, we made a few changes from the past years. First, we merged the Information Processing (IP) and the Sensor Platforms, Tools and Design Methods (SPOTS) tracks. Over the years, SPOTS track has fostered the research and dissemination of networked sensor platforms and design tools. It is a stable and integral part of the conference. We no longer need to call it out as a separate track. In IPSN 2014, although the authors may indicate whether their submissions are targeted for IP or SPOTS track, the reviews were assigned across tracks to the most appropriate reviewers. Among accepted papers, one third are labeled as SPOTS submissions by the authors, a similar ration of those in the submissions. Another change in IPSN 2014 was an experimental call for Challenge papers. The goal of these papers is to motivate the research community to think about new directions and future challenges. We received five challenge paper submissions, but none has passed the rigorous review process. This year, we received 111 submissions spanning across all areas of network sensors and information processing. These papers are from 5 continents, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. The reviews were handled in two phases. In the first phase, all papers received three reviews. All papers with at least one weak accept recommendation entered the second phase, where they received at least two more reviews. A physical TPC meeting was held in Houston, TX, USA, where 46 papers were discussed by the committee. In the end, 23 papers were accepted to appear in the final program. The acceptance rate is 20.7%. Then, each paper was shepherded by a TPC member to ensure that the final versions meet the highest publication quality. In the entire review process, we handled conflict of interests seriously. TPC members were blocked from reading the reviews and listening to discussions on papers that they have conflict with. Two papers co-authored by a TPC chair were handled out of the review system.