Leveraging Mobile Phones to Support Participatory Urban Sensing

Urban sensing systems based on mobile phones offer unprecedented observational capacity at the scale of the individual; at they same time they are remarkably scalable and affordable given the wide proliferation of cellular phone infrastructure and consumer devices that incorporate digital imagers, bluetooth short-range radios, and location services such as GPS . Many of the architectural lessons learned through the design and deployment of environmental sensing systems appear applicable to urban sensing as well. As with environmental sensing, multiscale data and models are essential to provide interpretive context for individual data streams, and mobility is essential to achieve scalability and coverage. Moreover in-network and decentralized processing will be critical to support privacy and personal control. These systems promise to become a very effective "make a case" technology to address a range of civic concerns, from public health to safety and sustainability…at the same time that they will push even further on our societies concept of privacy and private space. In this talk I will draw upon work-in-progress at the Center for Embedded Sensing.