2. Participatory Sensing: from ecosystems to human systems
Deborah Estrin, UCLA CS and CENS, destrin@cs.ucla.edu
In collaboration with faculty, students, staff at CENS
Enabled by >3 x 109 mobile Motivated by 6 x 109
phone users, increasingly people on planet earth
with gps, imagers, UI and their concerns...
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3. Participatory Sensing
An approach to data collection and interpretation in
which individuals, acting alone or in groups, use their
personal mobile devices and web services to
systematically explore interesting aspects of their
worlds, ranging from health to culture.
continuum from automated sensing
to participatory observation
examples help....
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4. Civic and environmental data campaigns
leveraging coordinated, real-time, geo-coded, tagged, images and prompted entries
GarbageWatch What’s Bloomin
Recycling Practices on Campus 1 2 Blooming Flora on Campus
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4
5
Paper Aluminum Plastic Waste
Reddy, et al
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5. Healthy ecosystems: What’s Invasive!
dual use for stewardship and engagement
Harding grass
Perennial pepperwood
Poison hemlock
Spanish broom
Terracina spurge
Yellow starthistle
http://whatsinvasive.com
w/National Park Service, Santa Monica Mountains Graham et al
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6. Healthy ecosystems: Project Budburst
engage citizens as sensors of micro-environment
Phenology icons make
it easy to quickly
identify observed
plant stages.
http://www.budburst.ucar.edu/
Graham et al
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7. Science education and computational thinking
• Computational thinking and data in
everyday life
• Stresschill mapping pilot w/300 high
school students in LA
• Inquiry-based observation, analysis,
expression
for biological, environmental, physical,
social sciences, arts and culture
Degges et al
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8. Healthier communities: Boyle Heights
“ ... Typically planning
processes and planners come in
and plan with an outside
perspective instead of looking
at existing patterns of resident
flow.”
• 200 residents documenting
conditions in and between
work, school, housing
• Where they go and gather, the
conditions surrounding them.
Lukac et al
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9. Sustainable communities: Biketastic
promoting safe cycle-commuting
location+motion trace augmented
with images and tagging
Capture & share route features
Collect: location, duration,
stops/starts, roughness,
prompted images/tags
Web interface compares route
qualities
Future: mash up routes with
air quality, traffic conditions,
accidents
http://biketastic.com, mobile app available on Android Market
Reddy et al 20
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10. Sustainable habits: Personal Environmental Impact Report
leveraging gps/accelerometer/wifi-based location-activity-time series
Burke et al
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11. Challenge: Incentives
From informational to micro-payments: an initial study
Informational incentives, such as
providing analytics about actions, Set micro-payments most
are effective to encourage effective in promoting even
individuals to contribute participation
Micro-payments based on
competition best suited for short
bursty data collections
Fair payments for all
Example:
Speed
participants was important - very
Biketastic
11.185
low baseline micro-payments
discouraged individuals
Reddy
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12. Healthier individuals: experience/activity sampling
hybrid of time-location trace with media capture and self-report.
Our Actions Our Self Report Private
Data Storage
geocoded,
time-stamped
entries
mobility traces
aggregate measures,
Visualization trends, patterns Processing
event detection
Photo – Marshall Astor
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13. 12
http://your.flowingdata.com/ Yau, Hansen
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14. Challenge: privacy and selective sharing
Personal data streams quantify habits, routines, associations
Easy to share and mine; difficult to anonymize
Data handling by mobile carriers, credit card companies, is regulated;
individual is free to capture and share her own data:
“Everything is free to you, except for the data we collect about you”
Calls for new privacy practices...personal data vaults
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15. Conclusion
If you can’t go to the field with the sensor you want...go with the sensor you have!
The power of the Internet, the reach of the phone (Voxiva)
Humans are in this loop--so HCI, privacy, visualization, bias, are challenges; and end
to end systems that users can exercise are part of the process
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16. Acknowledgments: Collaborators and Sponsors
Collaborators
Faculty/PIs: Jeff Burke, Deborah Estrin, Mark Hansen, Ramesh Govindan, Eric Graham,
Jerry Kang, Nithya Ramanathan, Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus, Mani Srivastava, Dallas
Swendeman, Michael Swiernik
Students/staff: Peter Capone-Newton, Patrick Crutcher, Betta Dawson, Joey Degges,
Hossein Falaki, Brent Flagstaff, Cameron Ketcham, Donnie Kim, Keith Mayoral, Min Mun,
Nathan Yau, Sasank Reddy, Ruth West, Vids Samanta, Katie Shilton, Masanao Yajima, Eric
Yuen
Sponsors and Partners/Collaborators
UCLA centers: CENS, REMAP, Global center for families and children, Health Sciences
Federal funding: NSF: NETS-FIND Program, OIA, Ethics, BPC; NIH, NOAA
Corporate funding: Cisco, Google, Intel, MSR, Nokia, Sun, T-Mobile
Foundations/NGOs: Woodrow Wilson Center, Conservation International, Saint Johns Well
Family and Childrens Clinics, Project Surya
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