Seminar Kommunikation und Multimedia: "Crowd Sensing" (Master)

The Nericell project focuses on road and traffic monitoring using an ensemble of mobile smartphones carried by people in normal course. The vision is that when a user who is participating in Nericell puts their phone in their pocket and starts driving, software on the phone will automatically monitor road and traffic conditions along their drive, and convey this information to a service in the cloud for aggregation and reporting.

• Microsoft Nericell
• PRISM

The number of mobile devices capable of sensing their environment such as smartphones and their density are increasing, especially in populated areas like cities. Thus, more and more efforts emerge that try to use these devices and their sensing capabilities, standalone but more notably also combined via cloud infrastructure, to improve on various aspects of urban traffic and the experience for its participants. Applications such as optimizing the search for an available parking space or incorparating the personal mood and preferences into trip planning when using public transport are proposed.

This paper shall give an overview of applications proposed to improve different aspects of urban traffic.

• ParkSense: a smartphone based sensing system for on-street parking
• Smart Mobile Sensing for Measuring Quality of Experience in Urban Public Transports

This topic focusses on the question, how can we design Participatory Sensing systems in such a way that participation is encouraged. Another important question is, what do we want to achieve with participatory sensing capabilities? Do we just want to add up information to the piles possessed and owned by the likes of Google and Facebook? How can society benefit?

• Participatory sensing in public spaces: activating urban surfaces with sensor probes

Incentive schemes are important to achieve enough participation in a crowd sensing network. Furthermore, decentralized reputation management is crucial to prevent network abuse and distribution of false data. Unfortunately, these schemes often stand in contrast to privacy considerations, because they require unique identifiers and context information.

This seminar paper shall give an overview over privacy-preserving variants of these schemes. The student should start the literature research with the paper "Opportunistic Sensing: Security Challenges for the New Paradigm", which has been cited several times. Based on these citations, further papers should be read and analyzed to give a detailed picture of the current state of the art in this research area.

• Opportunistic Sensing: Security Challenges for the New Paradigm
• Google Scholar: Citations of this overview paper

This topic focusses on public and personal health and how it can be preserved or increased by Crowd Sensing.

In this seminar, first a short overview has to be given, which approaches exist to utilize the crowd to preserve and increase the personal and/or public health. After that, some (self-chosen) projects have to be presented and compared in detail.

• Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and sensor web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples
• Google Scholar: Citations of this overview paper
• References within this overview paper

This topic focusses on environmental health and crisis management and how it can be preserved or increased by Crowd Sensing.

Disasters of any kind mostly occur unexpected and people are normally not well prepared in the first place. Communication infrastructure may collapse and even normal broadcast media may be not working any more. But, some/most of the people are still there and need to handle the disaster; additionally helpers from outside have to rely on information from within the disaster area.

In this seminar, first a short overview has to be given, which approaches exist to utilize the crowd to handle the crisis and to (re)organize communication. After that, some (self-chosen) projects have to be presented and compared in detail.

• Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and sensor web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples
• Google Scholar: Citations of this overview paper
• References within this overview paper