7,162 research outputs found
Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative
The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal
agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual
action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality,
noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban
environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that
the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens
themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This
is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling
large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first
such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens
were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing
devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of
pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are
provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this
study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in
measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also
highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and
environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of
policies towards decreasing pollution.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, 1 supplementary fil
Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges
Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are
clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's
smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come
equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as
accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has
enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm,
such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime
control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior
sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process,
since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information
about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or
maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes
more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for
defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the
current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research
challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN
Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses
Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing
Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges
Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of
smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously
possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the
users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is
paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation.
In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for
participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing
incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently
discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally,
we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in
participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201
Studying user behavior through a participatory sensing framework in an urban context
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information SystemsThe widespread use of mobile devices has given birth to participatory sensing,
a data collection approach leveraging the sheer number of device users, their
mobility, intelligence and device’s increasingly powerful computing and sensing
capabilities. As a result, participatory sensing is able to collect various types of
information at a high spatial and temporal resolution and it has many applications
ranging from measuring cellular signal strength or road condition monitoring to
observing the distribution of birds. However, in order to achieve better results from
participatory sensing, some issues needed to be dealt with. On a high level, this
thesis addressed two issues: (1) the design and development of a participatory
sensing framework that allows users to flexibly create campaigns and at the same
time collect different types of data and (2) the study of different aspects of the user
behaviors in the context of participatory sensing.
In particular, the first contribution of the thesis is the design and development of
Citizense, a participatory sensing framework that facilitates flexible deployments
of participatory sensing campaigns while at the same time providing intuitive
interfaces for users to create sensing campaigns and collect a variety of data
types. During the real-world deployments of Citizense, it has shown its effectiveness
in collecting different types of urban information and subsequently received
appreciation from different stakeholders. The second contribution of the thesis
is the in-depth study of user behavior under the presence of different monetary
incentive mechanisms and the analysis of the spatial and temporal user behavior
when participants are simultaneously exposed to a large number of participatory
sensing campaigns. Concerning the monetary incentive, it is observed that participants
prefer fixed micro-payment to other mechanisms (i.e., lottery, variable
micro-payment); their participation was increased significantly when they were
given this incentive. When taking part in the participatory sensing process, participants exhibit certain spatial and temporal behaviors. They tend to primarily
contribute in their free time during the working week, although the decision to
respond and complete a particular participatory sensing campaign seems to be
correlated to the campaign’s geographical context and/or the recency of the participants’
activities. Participants can be divided into two groups according to their
behaviors: a smaller group of active participants who frequently perform participatory
sensing activities and a larger group of regular participants who exhibit more
intermittent behaviors
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Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions
The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions
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