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Crowdsourced sensing and collaboration using Twitter

Despite the ubiquitous availability of the sensor and smartphone devices, the-state-of-the-art falls short of the ubiquitous computing vision. We argue that the reason for this gap is the lack of an infrastructure to task/utilize these devices for collaboration. We propose that Twitter can provide an "open" publish-subscribe infrastructure for sensors and smartphones, and pave the way for crowdsourced sensing and collaboration applications. In our preliminary work, we designed and implemented a crowdsourced sensing system over Twitter, and deployed a crowdsourced weather radar using our system. Our results from this real-world Twitter experiment show promise for the feasibility of this approach.

In this project, we propose to (1) solve the challenges in sensor/smartphone integration to Twitter (establishing sensor tweet standards, providing incentives, building filters, exploiting social networking features), (2) implement our crowdsourced sensing and collaboration system over Hadoop and deploy it on the cloud for elastic scalability, (3) deploy a participatory noise-mapping application on Android-based smartphones, and (4) design social collaboration applications and integrate with Google Latitude.

News

Doctoral Student Murat Ali Bayir graduated, Congratulations Murat! May 2010.
Crowd-Sourced Sensing and Collaboration Project got Google Research Award! Click here for details, March 2010.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Demirbas got NSF Project Grant! Click here for details, September 2009.
Doctoral Student Xuming Lu graduated, Congratulations Xuming! May 2009.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Demirbas got Office of Naval Research Grant! Click here for details, April 2009.
Two papers accepted to WOWMOM 2009 from Ubicomp Lab!, Click here for details, December 2008.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Demirbas awarded NSF Career Award! Click here for details, January 2008.