Mobile Personal Sensing Systems: Applications and Architecture

Mobile Personal Sensing systems leveraging mobile phones offer unprecedented observational capacity at the scale of the individual; at the same time they are remarkably scalable and affordable given the wide proliferation of cellular phone infrastructure and consumer devices that incorporate location services such as GPS, digital imagers, bluetooth short-range radios, and easy programmability. These systems promise to become a very effective “make a case” technology to address a range of civic concerns, from public health to safety and sustainability…at the same time that they will push even further on our society’s concept of privacy and private space. Many of the architectural lessons learned through the design and deployment of environmental sensing systems appear applicable to these systems as well. As with environmental sensing, multiscale data and models are essential to provide interpretive context for individual data streams, and mobility is essential to achieve scalability and coverage. Moreover decentralized processing will be critical to support privacy and personal control. In this talk I will draw upon work-in-progress at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA.

Speaker Details

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UCLA. She holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the National Science Foundation funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). CENS’ mission is to explore and develop innovative, end-to-end, distributed sensing systems, across an array of scientifically and socially relevant applications, from ecosystems to human systems. Estrin is currently exploring Mobile Personal Sensing systems that leverage the location, acoustic, image, and attached-sensor data streams increasingly available globally from mobile phones; with particular emphasis on human and environmental health applications and on privacy-aware architectures. Estrin’s earlier research addressed Internet protocol design and scaling, in particular, inter-domain and multicast routing. She received her PhD in 1985 from MIT and her BS in 1980 from UC Berkeley, both in EECS. Estrin currently serves on the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and was previously a member of the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Advisory board, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and DARPA-ISAT. Estrin was selected as the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer in 2006 and was awarded the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2007. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. She is a fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS and was granted Doctor Honoris Causa from EPFL in 2008.

Date:
Speakers:
Deborah Estrin
Affiliation:
UCLA