1. A method for evaluating data from a network of sensors, wherein the method comprises: capturing data from multiple physical sensors in the network of sensors, wherein said data comprises carbon dioxide-related data, and wherein said capturing comprises establishing a communicative link between the multiple physical sensors and a network sensor management module executing on a hardware processor of a computing device; analyzing the data received from the multiple physical sensors using exemplar-based sparse representation processing representing multiple categories of possible events to create a sparse representation of the data, wherein said analyzing comprises selecting a subset of at least one category from the multiple categories that represents the data received from the multiple physical sensors, and wherein said analyzing is carried out by a network data processing module, executing on the hardware processor of the computing device and communicatively linked to the network sensor management module; determining at least one discrete sparse characteristic of an event in the data received from the multiple physical sensors based on the sparse representation of the data; classifying the data into one of multiple event classifications based on evaluation of the at least one discrete sparse characteristic of an event in the data; and performing at least one task associated with the representation of the event in the data based on said classifying; wherein (i) said determining, (ii) said classifying, and (iii) said performing are carried out by a decision maker module, executing on the hardware processor of the computing device and communicatively linked to the network sensor management module and the network data processing module.