Exploring the role of smartphone technology for citizen science in agriculture

Citizen science is the involvement of citizens, such as farmers, in the research process. Citizen science has become increasingly popular recently, supported by the proliferation of mobile communication technologies such as smartphones. However, citizen science methodologies have not yet been widely adopted in agricultural research. Here, we conducted an online survey with 57 British and French farmers in 2014. We investigated (1) farmer ownership and use of smartphone technologies, (2) farmer use of farm-specific management apps, and (3) farmer interest and willingness to participate in agricultural citizen science projects. Our results show that 89 % respondents owned a smartphone, 84 % used it for farm management, and 72 % used it on a daily basis. Fifty-nine percent engaged with farm-specific apps, using on average four apps. Ninety-three percent respondents agreed that citizen science was a useful methodology for data collection, 93 % for real-time monitoring, 83 % for identification of research questions, 72 % for experimental work, and 72 % for wildlife recording. Farmers also showed strong interest to participate in citizen science projects, often willing to commit substantial amounts of time. For example, 54 % of British respondents were willing to participate in farmland wildlife recording once a week or monthly. Although financial support was not always regarded as necessary, experimental work was the most likely activity for which respondents thought financial support would be essential. Overall, this is the first study to quantify and explore farmers' use of smartphones for farm management, and document strong support for farm-based citizen science projects. (Résumé d'auteur

BlockSee: Blockchain for IoT video surveillance in smart cities

The growing demand for safety in urban environments is supported by monitoring using video surveillance. The need to analyze multiple video-flows from different cameras deployed around the city by heterogeneous owners introduces vulnerabilities and privacy issues. Video frames, timestamps, and camera settings can be digitally manipulated by malicious users; the positions of cameras, their orientation and their mechanical settings can be physically manipulated. Digital and physical manipulations may have several effects, including the change of the observed scene and the potential violation of neighbors' privacy. To face these risks, we introduce BlockSee, a blockchain-based video surveillance system that jointly provides validation and immutability to camera settings and surveillance videos, making them readily available to authorized users in case of events. The encouraging results obtained with BlockSee pave the way to new distributed city-wide monitoring systems

Event detection over continuous data stream for the sustainable growth in agriculture context

The coordination failure is a concept that explains the failure of people to coordinate and act on a real-world problem properly. The failure of coordination among human communities can lead to social problems in many domains including in transportation, health care, disaster management, agriculture etc. and ultimately affects the sustainable growth of a country as a whole. The recent advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have introduced a new trend called Collaborative Consumption - the peer-to-peer based coordination and sharing of information through online by human communities has been expected to solve these social problems identified in the above domains. The tremendous adaptation of people towards ICTs ultimately resulted in huge, fast-moving and heterogeneous data contributed by people in a collaborative manner. In here, most of these data describe real-time events associated with the people based on their context. The way of coordinating user communities to contribute data, detecting events from it and effective delivery of required information to needful parties would be a possible solution to overcome the coordination problem. In this paper, the result of a systematic literature review is performed to understand the current state of the event detection methods used in information systems. Furthermore, we have proposed a user centered mobile based information system that assists the detection of pest outbreak events in agriculture domain for an effective and timely delivery of actionable information to farmers

The Experience of Chamwino Small-Scale Farmers on the Use of Smartphone in Farming Business, Tanzania

Part 2: Digital Platforms for DevelopmentInternational audienceThe pervasive use of smartphones to acquire diverse information among small-scale farmers has received little attention in studies. This study, therefore, explored the experience of Chamwino’s small-scale farmers of the usage of smartphone to address ownership pattern, farming practices, information needs, encountered challenges and training needs for future technological alterations. The study employed qualitative design for data collection and thematic analysis was used. The findings revealed that the longer the distance from Dodoma city centre, the fewer the number of smartphones owners. That, less than half of farmers in Mvumi and Makangwa owned smartphones while, less than a quarter in Itiso, Mpwayungu, and Chilonwa Divisions. That youths owned more smartphones than elders, and mostly second-hand that were inadequately used for farming business. This was because, there was no special farming enabled information system to disseminate agricultural information. Accordingly, the frequently used features were SMS and voice calls. Consequently, farmers need information on inputs, weather, market and finance among others. Alternatively, there was no official training on the use of the device thus the new technology was therefore underutilized. Furthermore, challenges identified were farmers’ lack of expertise of utilizing the device, uncomfortable large size and the interface of smartphones. Accordingly, farmers were interested in capacity building as many features were not used adequately. Consequently, the study provides deep understanding of farmers’ experience and recommends for technological alteration to increase usability of the device

Video Navigation with a Personal Viewing History

Abstract. We describe a new video interface based on a recorded personal navigation history which provides simple mechanisms to quickly find and watch previously viewed intervals, highlight segments of video the user found interesting and support other video tasks such as crowd-sourced video popularity measures and consumer-level video editing. Our novel history interface lets users find previously viewed intervals more quickly and provides a more enjoyable video navigation experience, as demonstrated by the study we performed. The user study tasked participants with viewing a pre-defined history of a subset of the video and answering questions about the video content: 83.9 % of questions (average) were answered correctly using the personal navigation history, while 65.5 % were answered using the state-of-art method; they took significantly less time to answer a question using our method. The full video navigation interface received an 82 % average QUIS rating. The results show that our history interface can be an effective part of video players and browsers