The main scientific contribution of ASPIRE was the development of innovative concepts and solutions to the challenges presented by the envisioned availability of very large numbers of possibly heterogeneous sensors each of which is limited in power, computation, memory and communication bandwidth. The project made contributions to the foundations of what is truly a new discipline. To this goal, FORTH, the project coordinator, together with its partners, the University of Valencia (UVEG) and the University of Southern California (USC), drew from their extensive research experience in array and statistical non-Gaussian signal processing, adaptive systems, multiresolution signal & image denoising, compression and classification, statistical communication theory, and immersive multimedia technology.