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

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

Citizen noise pollution monitoring

Trabajo presentado a la 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government, celebrada en Puebla (México) del 17 al 21 de mayo de 2009.In this paper we present a new approach to monitor noise pollution involving citizens and built upon the notions of participatory sensing and citizen science. We enable citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment by using GPS-equipped mobile phones as noise sensors. The geo-localised measures and user-generated meta-data can be automatically sent and shared online with the public to contribute to the collective noise mapping of cities. Our prototype, called NoiseTube, can be found online.This work was partially supported by the EU under contract IST- 34721 (TAGora). The TAGora project is funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program (IST-FET) of the European Commission. Matthias Stevens is a Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (Aspirant van het Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen).Peer reviewe

2Loud? Monitoring traffic noise with mobile phones

The World Health Organization has recently focused attention on guidelines for night noise in urban areas, based on significant medical evidence of the adverse impacts of exposure to excessive traffic noise on health, especially caused by sleep disturbance. This includes serious illnesses, such as hypertension, arteriosclerosis and myocardial infarction. 2Loud? is a research project with the aim of developing and testing a mobile phone application to allow a community to monitor traffic noise in their environment, with focus on the night period and indoor measurement. Individuals, using mobile phones, provide data on characteristics of their dwellings and systematically record the level of noise inside their homes overnight. The records from multiple individuals are sent to a server, integrated into indicators and shared through mapping. The 2Loud? application is not designed to replace existing scientific measurements, but to add information which is currently not available. Noise measurements to assist the planning and management of traffic noise are normally carried out by designated technicians, using sophisticated equipment, and following specific guidelines for outdoors locations. This process provides very accurate records, however, for being a time consuming and expensive system, it results in a limited number of locations being surveyed and long time between updates. Moreover, scientific noise measurements do not survey inside dwellings. In this paper we present and discuss the participatory process proposed, and currently under implementation and test, to characterize the levels of exposure to traffic noise of residents living in the vicinity of highways in the City of Boroondara (Victoria, Australia) using the 2Loud? application

From the cartographic gaze to contestatory cartographies

Rene Descartes declared in the 16th Century that the world was now dominated by the visual, a notion that would be seen as defining the Enlightenment (Descartes, cited in Potts, 2015). As the increased dominance of seeing and the desire to visualise the world cohered with the production of increasingly accurate tools of measurement and the advent of the printing press, cartography emerged as a discipline, often used as tool of oppression and dominance. Cartographic visualizations, afforded the creator, and user, a Gods eye view of the world. Following others (See Casas-Cortés et. al., 2013; Koch, 1998), this chapter refers to this way of seeing the world from above as the Cartographic Gaze. First, the chapter briefly examines the historical emergence of the Cartographic Gaze before turning to a discussion about how the proliferation of geographic imaging technologies and digital tools simultaneously further embedded this gaze into mapping practice, while also diffusing such practices of mapping to broader populations. Discussing the rise of participatory mapping and counter mapping under the rubric of contestatory cartographies, the chapter presents some of the challenges that face those attempting to create alternative maps of their worlds, and the ways in which they become entrapped by the pervasiveness of the Cartographic Gaze. We use the term participatory mapping to refer to methodologies for map-making based around the participation of those who the map will represent. And we employ the term counter mapping to reference those mapping practices that explicitly seek to expose and challenge power relations. In specific, we look at how the colonizing origins of the Cartographic Gaze limit what it is possible to do with these alternative mapping practices

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

Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design activities are somewhat limited. In this paper, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a smart city project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising participatory design at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city