CENS

Urban sensing brings innovative measurement systems into everyday life. Sustainable design, healthy living, and effective stewardship of the world’s limited resources, require a deep understanding of how countless individual actions generate global effects and how individuals relate to their local environments—natural, built and cultural. Until now, scientists, NGOs, policy-makers, and the public have had to choose between examining the broad characteristics of large populations and looking at small groups in detail. Urban sensing targets technologies and applications that transform our capacity to help individuals, families, and communities monitor and improve their health behaviors, adopt sustainable practices in resource consumption, and participate in civic processes. We envision personal, urban, and global scale data collection and analysis using “everyday” technologies like mobile phones, and allowing individuals to decide what, where, and when to sense.