Towards Community Sensing
- Eric Horvitz ,
- Aman Kansal ,
- Feng Zhao
International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) |
Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
A great opportunity exists to fuse information from pop-
ulations of privately-held sensors to create useful sensing
applications. For example, GPS devices, embedded in cell-
phones and automobiles, might one day be employed as
distributed networks of velocity sensors for traffic monitor-
ing and routing. Unfortunately, privacy and resource con-
siderations limit access to such data streams. We describe
principles of community sensing that offer mechanisms for
sharing data from privately held sensors. The methods take
into account the likely availability of sensors, the context-
sensitive value of sensor information, based on models of
phenomena and demand, and sensor owners’ preferences
about privacy and resource usage. We present efficient and
well-characterized approximations of optimal sensing poli-
cies. We provide details on key principles of community
sensing and highlight their use within a case study for road
traffic monitoring.
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