A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

Unlike scientific applications, many sensors for urban applications are already ‘out there,’ watching and listening. Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighborhoods, and the near ubiquity of wireless access in many future urban settings will allow us to publish or share data easily, immediately. Soon private citizens will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their communities. They will be able to cross-reference spatially and temporally tagged data they gather with publicly available data from private and municipal monitoring of the city—traffic, weather, air quality, pedestrian flow—the environment and rhythms of urban life.

At the edges of culture, lightweight web applications, built on this publicly available information and free web services, emerge already almost daily to explore new linkages among these varied data.

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We suggest that urban and social sensing applications will flourish only given a flexible sensor information fabric that allows a wide range of data remixing, correlation and fusion applications.

[via: Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, Urban Sensing Project]

Why do I blog this? Go to the well-done Urban Sensing website to find detailed descriptions about a variety of mobile sensing application scenarios. Why not start with the PEIR Personal Environmental Impact Report?

We have an insatiable desire to make sense of the world around
us. How do we best observe and record the details of time, nature,
location, events, and our own personal experiences? How can we
understand the interactions among data and utilize them with
intelligence and responsibility? To explore these questions, Nokia
has spurred an explosion of sensor-based research in which the
mobile phone plays a front-line role in sensing, processing, and
communicating an array of valuable information.

[Source: Nokia Research Center - Sensing the World with Mobile Devices (PDF)]

Why do I blog this? The concept of people-centric sensing is intriguing, humans with their total mobility are carrying Internet-connected mobile phones nearly all the time and thus it shapes a social sensing overlay of tremendous scale. Sensing anywhere and anytime. Definitely worth reading the vision of Nokia Research.

urban sensing is about people like you—equipped with today’s mobile + web technology—systematically observing, studying, reflecting on, and sharing your unique world. through discovery and connected participation, you can see the world anew. you can tell your local story. you can make change.

welcome to urban sensing

[Source: UrbanSensing CENS/UCLA Research Group]

It’s worth taking a look at the urban sensing projects they are working on.

Why do I blog this? The idea of participatory sensing or people-centric sensing is tremendous with regards to the  Mobile Web revolution we will face in the next years, mobile sensing of sensor data and user-generated content will open up new interesting data streams.

Tagcrumbs is a non-domain specific platform for user-generated textual place annotations with a focus on the Mobile Web. With regards to mobile sensing applications I see potential for the augmentation of sensor measurements (e.g. pollution data) with the Tagcrumbs place data to grasp a better space-time context. It’s about opening up very specific niche mobile sensing applications to increase value and interoperability in the long-run.

Last week I gave a presentation to the Sensor Middleware Unit showing an overview of the research I am doing as part of my master thesis at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute. Any feedback welcome, slides are below.

Pervasive sensor networks are the source of continuous data streams about our physical environment. With the rise of the Mobile Web people-centric sensing yields a new layer of spatiotemporal contextual data, from qualitative user-generated content (e.g. geo-referenced multimedia messages) to quantitative sensor measurements (e.g. earthquake or hazard alerts). This mobile sensed content is made accessible within an ecosystem of heterogenous service providers, from social networks to social data networks. The mining, analysis and processing of these streams provides many challenges and semantic technologies can be utilized to overcome this heterogeneity. The integration of sensor data with a user-generated context will provide an increased situational awareness and contextual knowledge, resulting in application scenarios from more efficient emergency response management to improved urban planning.