CENS Technical Seminar Series

Community Sensing

Invited Speaker: Aman Kansal
Date: May 9, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: Boelter Hall 4760

Abstract

A great opportunity exists to sense the world using privately-held sensors. SenseWeb provides an infrastructure to share such sensors and create useful sensing applications enabling much larger coverage and reduced deployment overheads compared to stand-alone sensor network deployments. For example, mobile phones exist in large numbers with widespread coverage and may be used for sensing road traffic congestion using built in or Bluetooth connected GPS receivers. However, SenseWeb cannot continuously stream all sensor data from such sensors due to device energy and privacy constraints. We describe principles of community sensing that offer mechanisms for sharing data from privately held sensors in an energy and privacy sensitive manner. 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 policies. We use the road traffic sensing application as our evaluation platform and show that for real world user mobility and traffic data traces our techniques can significantly reduce the number of sensor data samples required.

Biography

Aman Kansal is a Researcher in the Networked Embedded Computing group at Microsoft Research. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of California Los Angeles, where he was honored with the department's Outstanding PhD Award.

He received his MS in Communications and Signal Processing and BS in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His research interests include sensor-actuator networks, energy-proportional computing, wireless and mobile computing, and embedded systems. Most recently, his work has encompassed shared sensor networks of mobile phones, webcams, and other sensors, embedded flash storage, controlled mobility in sensor networks, energy harvesting theory and systems, and embedded network management. His research prototypes in these areas have been recognized through demo and design contest awards at international conferences, and are being used by academic and industrial researchers in several countries.