Deborah Estrin, UCLA | Leveraging mobile phones to support participatory urban sensing March 18, 2008

Special Lecture
sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Berkeley Institute of Design

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.

Deborah Estrin (Ph.D. MIT, 1985; BSEE UCB, 1980) is a Professor of Computer Science, holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). CENS mission is to explore and develop innovative, application-focused, distributed sensing systems, from ecosystems to human systems. Deborah’s earlier work focused on Internet scaling, including inter-domain and multicast routing. Since the late 90's her work has focused on multi-disciplinary, experimental-systems research and development as applied to a variety of environmental monitoring challenges. Most recently this work includes participatory-sensing systems, at the personal and community level, leveraging the location, acoustic, image, and attached-sensor data streams increasingly available from mobile phones.

Official Website: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events/sl20080318