Sensing technologies will soon allow more information collection than ever before imagined. New uses of sensing technologies include the crowdsourcing of geographic information and knowledge, a large number of urban planning applications that will enable smart cities, and new intelligent systems across every industry and pursuit imaginable.
A city in India, Bengaluru, for example, is using sensing technology to track and tackle air pollution and is part of a new joint venture called “Sensors Without Borders.” Humans are now becoming sensors themselves as they wear and soon house new sensors that will collect data for scientific analysis.
University of Michigan civil engineering graduate Antonio Velazquez explained in his widely acclaimed, Ph.D. dissertation, that the world will soon be radically altered by “new upcoming emergent technologies such as cloud-assisted mobile sensing applications, distributed mobile sensing and computing, or participatory sensing, crowd-sensing, and human-centric sensing.”
As we know, communication is now real time, so huge amounts of data are live streamed from devices to GIS systems, supercomputers, and more. New community-based traffic models, forest monitoring equipment with remote sensing, and every human on the earth with sensors attached to their cell phones is a data scientist’s dream, or nightmare, depending on their innate abilities. Much work needs to be done to allow efficient and error-free collection of data from all of the sources, but the challenge will soon be overcome.
The following video explains PEPSI: Privacy-Enhanced Participatory Sensing Infrastructure, and its targets, methods, and privacy issues.
