Colloquium "Urban crowd sensing: collecting and sharing air quality data in motion"

Abstract:

In this talk we review state-of-the art solutions for mobile crowd sensing (MCS) to identify the main requirements and challenges related to building and deploying MCS applications. MCS is a novel class of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications for community sensing where sensors and mobile devices jointly collect and share data of interest to observe phenomena over a larger geographic area. We present a holistic view on MCS: from air quality sensors and our cloud-based publish/subscribe platform for mobile IoT, to an application for urban environmental crowd sensing entitled “Sense the Zagreb air.” Both the sensors and the publish/subscribe platform are developed within the FP7 project OpenIoT, Open Source blueprint for large scale self-organizing cloud environments, which builds an open-source platform for the Internet of Things. First we present the architecture of a sensor node developed for use with smartphones for opportunistic sensing of air quality in urban environments. Our solution features inexpensive metal-oxide semiconductor gas sensors (MOX) for measurement of gas concentration, along with sensors for ambient temperature and humidity. Next we present CUPUS, an open-source cloud-based publish/subscribe middleware adequate for deploying MCS applications. CUPUS enables energy-efficient and context-aware orchestration of the sensing process with data transmission from sensors through mobile devices into the cloud, as well as from the cloud to mobile devices such that information of interest is served to users in real-time. Finally, we present an integrated MCS application “Sense the Zagreb air” with its unique energy-related and real-time properties.

Motivation and promotion video is available on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poJnNATZjEo.

CVs:

Ivana Podnar Žarko is Associate Professor at the Department of Telecommunications Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her current research interests are in the area of large-scale distributed information systems and data stream processing. Currently she is the FER team leader of the FP7 project "OpenIoT: Open Source Solution for the Internet of Things into the Cloud."