OpenSense: Open sensor networks for air quality monitoring

Prof. Karl Aberer (EPFL)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2011-12-06
TIME: 10:00:00 - 11:30:00
LOCATION: CSIRO Seminar Room S206
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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. This talk will first provide 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. The second part of the talk will discuss in more detail aspects of sensor data processing relevant to the OpenSense project. We introduce Global Sensor Networks, a platform for sharing sensor data over the Internet, present a generic probabilistic method for estimating sensor data quality, 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 the next steps we plan to undertake within OpenSense towards realizing a community-based approach for addressing health concerns of urban populations.

BIO:
Karl Aberer is a full professor for Distributed Information Systems at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, since 2000. Since 2005 he is the Director of the Swiss National Research Centre for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch). Prior to his current position, he was senior researcher at the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1991 from the ETH ZArich. His research interests are on semantics and self- organization in information systems with applications in peer-to-peer search, semantic web, trust management and mobile and sensor networks. He is or has been serving on the editorial boards of SIGMOD Record, VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and WorldWide Web Journal and been co-chairing among others the ICDE, ISWC, MDM, ODBASE, P2P, VLDB and WISE conferences.