Keynote: OpenSense: Open sensor networks for air quality monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks and publishing of sensor data on the Internet bear the potential to substantially increase public awareness and involvement in environmental sustainability. Air pollution monitoring in urban areas is a prime example of such an application as common air pollutants have direct effect on the human health. However, bringing the vision of public involvement in environmental monitoring to a reality poses today substantial technical challenges for the communication and information systems infrastructure, to scale up from isolated well controlled systems to an open and scalable infrastructure. In this talk we provide first an overview of the OpenSense project for air pollution monitoring. OpenSense takes a holistic, end-to-end systems perspective. The crucial insight is that in designing open scalable sensing system one has to consider dependencies among many system dimensions both for modelling and control, including sensor behaviour, wireless networks, mobility, environmental models, user needs as well as trust and privacy concerns. In the second part of the talk we will discuss in more detail aspects of sensor data processing relevant to the OpenSense project. We will introduce model-based methods for sensor data cleaning, segmentation and multi-query processing. We will show a framework to extract semantic activity information from trajectory data and finally provide some initial results on studying the tradeoffs between privacy and sensor data accuracy in community sensing settings. Finally we will provide an outlook on some of our next steps we plan to undertake within OpenSense towards realizing a community-based approach for addressing health concerns of urban populations.