The research interests of Lothar Thiele include models, methods and software tools for the design of embedded systems and embedded software. Recently, there has been lots of interest in massively distributed electronic systems such as sensor networks. PermaSense is a great application which allows to test and deploy some of the conceptual and theoretical results that have been developed in the recent years. Besides the hard work that is necessary to build complete systems that are able to function reliably under harsh environmental conditions, we take much pleasure in the cooperation with environmental sciences.