12,646 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
PS-Sim: A Framework for Scalable Simulation of Participatory Sensing Data
Emergence of smartphone and the participatory sensing (PS) paradigm have
paved the way for a new variant of pervasive computing. In PS, human user
performs sensing tasks and generates notifications, typically in lieu of
incentives. These notifications are real-time, large-volume, and multi-modal,
which are eventually fused by the PS platform to generate a summary. One major
limitation with PS is the sparsity of notifications owing to lack of active
participation, thus inhibiting large scale real-life experiments for the
research community. On the flip side, research community always needs ground
truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed models and algorithms. Most of
the PS applications involve human mobility and report generation following
sensing of any event of interest in the adjacent environment. This work is an
attempt to study and empirically model human participation behavior and event
occurrence distributions through development of a location-sensitive data
simulation framework, called PS-Sim. From extensive experiments it has been
observed that the synthetic data generated by PS-Sim replicates real
participation and event occurrence behaviors in PS applications, which may be
considered for validation purpose in absence of the groundtruth. As a
proof-of-concept, we have used real-life dataset from a vehicular traffic
management application to train the models in PS-Sim and cross-validated the
simulated data with other parts of the same dataset.Comment: Published and Appeared in Proceedings of IEEE International
Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP-2018
Cyber–Physical–Social Frameworks for Urban Big Data Systems: A Survey
The integration of things’ data on the Web and Web linking for things’ description and discovery is leading the way towards smart Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS). The data generated in CPS represents observations gathered by sensor devices about the ambient environment that can be manipulated by computational processes of the cyber world. Alongside this, the growing use of social networks offers near real-time citizen sensing capabilities as a complementary information source. The resulting Cyber–Physical–Social System (CPSS) can help to understand the real world and provide proactive services to users. The nature of CPSS data brings new requirements and challenges to different stages of data manipulation, including identification of data sources, processing and fusion of different types and scales of data. To gain an understanding of the existing methods and techniques which can be useful for a data-oriented CPSS implementation, this paper presents a survey of the existing research and commercial solutions. We define a conceptual framework for a data-oriented CPSS and detail the various solutions for building human–machine intelligence
How to study the city on instagram
We introduce Instagram as a data source for use by scholars in urban studies and neighboring disciplines and propose ways to operationalize key concepts in the study of cities. These data can help shed light on segregation, the formation of subcultures, strategies of distinction, and status hierarchies in the city. Drawing on two datasets of geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam and Copenhagen collected over a twelve-week period, we present a proof of concept for how to explore and visualize sociospatial patterns and divisions in these two cities. We take advantage of both the social and the geographic aspects of the data, using network analysis to identify distinct groups of users and metrics of unevenness and diversity to identify socio-spatial divisions. We also discuss some of the limitations of these data and methods and suggest ways in which they can complement established quantitative and qualitative approaches in urban scholarship
SenCity Workshop: Sensing Festivals as Cities
ACM allows authors to post the accepted, peer-reviewed version of their paper on the institutional repository. The published version is available at .In order to sense the mood of a city, we propose first looking at festivals. In festivals such as Glastonbury or Burning Man we see temporary cities where the inhabitants are engaged afresh with their environment and each other. Our position is that not only are there direct equivalences between larger festivals and cities, but in festivals the phenomena are often exaggerated, and the driving impulses often exploratory. These characteristics well suit research into sensing and intervening in the urban experience. To this end, we have built a corpus of sensor and social media data around a 18,000 attendee music festival and are developing ways of analysing and communicating it
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