Toward Massive Scale Air Quality Monitoring

Dangers associated with poor air quality are driving deployments of air quality monitoring technology. These deployments rely either on professional-grade measurement stations or a small number of low-cost sensors integrated into urban infrastructure. In this article, we present a research vision of real-time massive scale air quality sensing that integrates tens of thousands or even millions of air quality sensors to monitor air quality at fine spatial and temporal resolution. We highlight opportunities and challenges of our vision by discussing use cases, key requirements and reference technologies in order to establish a roadmap on how to realize this vision. We address the feasibility of our vision, introducing a testbed deployment in Helsinki, Finland, and carrying out controlled experiments that address collaborative and opportunistic sensor calibration, a key research challenge for our vision.Peer reviewe

Hot or Not? Robust and Accurate Continuous Thermal Imaging on FLIR cameras

Wearable thermal imaging is emerging as a powerful and increasingly affordable sensing technology. Current thermal imaging solutions are mostly based on uncooled forward looking infrared (FLIR), which is susceptible to errors resulting from warming of the camera and the device casing it. To mitigate these errors, a blackbody calibration technique where a shutter whose thermal parameters are known is periodically used to calibrate the measurements. This technique, however, is only accurate when the shutter's temperature remains constant over time, which rarely is the case. In this paper, we contribute by developing a novel deep learning based calibration technique that uses battery temperature measurements to learn a model that allows adapting to changes in the internal thermal calibration parameters. Our method is particularly effective in continuous sensing where the device casing the camera is prone to heating. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique through controlled benchmark experiments which show significant improvements in thermal monitoring accuracy and robustness.Peer reviewe

Impacts of insecticide exposure on bumblebee behaviour in a warming world

With ongoing agricultural land-use intensification and climate change, important functional groups of organisms, including insect pollinators, are being simultaneously and ubiquitously exposed to both pesticides and changing temperatures. Given the notable ongoing declines in insect pollinators, understanding how these stressors affect aspects of key functional behaviours underpinning fitness and pollination service provision is of global ecological and economic importance. Importantly, a critical but understudied step in evaluating pesticide risk is to understand how environmental temperature modulates pesticide effects on these behaviours. Through empirical lab experiments on a key wild pollinator, the bumblebee Bombus terrestris, I quantified the temperature dependent effects of insecticide exposure on individual flight and general mobility. Neonicotinoid exposure dramatically impaired flight motivation and endurance, and these same performance traits were also found to be highly sensitive to environmental temperature. However, the effect of neonicotinoid exposure varied depending on post-exposure temperature, with impacts on flight being enhanced under warmer conditions and impacts on food consumption, walking, and general responsiveness being enhanced under cooler conditions. The hazard posed by insecticides to insect pollinators may therefore vary both temporally and spatially, with impairment to flight and mobility traits likely constraining colony foraging potential and diminishing pollination service capabilities. Interestingly, the same effects were not seen across a different class of insecticide, with the new to market sulfoximine insecticide, sulfoxaflor, showing no detectable effect on any measure of mobility regardless of temperature when applied at comparable concentrations. The findings of this thesis suggest both the choice of insecticide and timing of exposure need to be considered in farming practices. Additionally, my findings provide crucial information for advising insecticide risk assessment protocols, developing mitigative and conservation action, and above all understanding which possible climate regions in the world insect pollinators are most at risk from insecticide exposure.Open Acces