Wireless sensor networks are increasingly seen as a solution to the problem of performing continuous wide-area monitoring in many environmental, security, and military scenarios. The distributed nature of such networks and the autonomous behavior expected of them presents many novel challenges. In this article, we argue that a new synthesis of electronic engineering and agent technology is required to address these challenges, and we describe three examples where this synthesis has succeeded. In more detail, we describe how these novel approaches address the need for communication and computationally efficient decentralized algorithms to coordinate the behavior of physically distributed sensors, how they enable the real-world deployment of sensor agent platforms in the field, and finally, how they facilitate the development of intelligent agents that can autonomously acquire data from these networks and perform information processing tasks such as fusion, inference, and prediction.