Participatory urban sensing: Challenges and opportunities

Summary form only given. Smartphones have become a pervasive technology as they are not only a powerful multimedia device but also offer a rich sensing platform with a plethora of built-in sensors, such as temperature, light, GPS, accelerometers, and so on. Smartphones also provide multiple wireless interfaces (e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular) to connect to the external sensors and the Internet. This has led to what is called participatory urban sensing in which users participate in the sensing campaign by continuously monitoring the surrounding environ-ment, collecting and transmitting multi-modal data streams. For example, users may send sensed information and opinions about current events (e.g., weather condition, real-time traffic or accidents, environmental noise and pollution monitoring, crime scenes, healthcare, social sensing, physical activity and well-being), thus leading to important inferences and decision making. This talk will highlight the challenges and unique opportunities in the emerging field of participatory urban sensing. Significant challenges include energy efficiency (i.e., battery life) of mobile devices, spatio-temporal uncertainty, sensing coverage and localization, user incentives for participation, reliability and quality of sensed data, big data and scaling issues, location and data privacy, trust and security. New solutions will be presented to address some of these issues along with experimental results from Android phones. The talk will be concluded with directions for future research.