A Platform for Citizen Sensing in Sentient Cities

Abstract

Abstract. This work develops upon the concepts of Sentient City -living in a city that can remember, correlate, and anticipate -and Citizen Sensor Networks. We aim at technologies to interconnect people, allowing them to actively observe, report, collect, analyse, and disseminate information about urban events. We are investigating new methods and technologies to enhance administrators' capabilities in urban planning and management. We are proposing a platform to instrument citizens and cities, interconnect parties, analyse related events, and provide recommendation and feedback reports. The solution encompasses four types of elements: (i) mobile applications for intentional and non-intentional reporting of events; (ii) enhanced analytic models to centralize information, analyse the data, identify trends and operation patterns, and provide insightful information to decision makers; (iii) advanced social simulations to anticipate "what if" scenarios for infrastructure planning; and (iv) interfaces for monitoring, feedback, and recommendation. This research builds upon the IBM Smarter Cities project, part of the IBM Smarter Planet program. The outcomes of this research yield significant social contributions. By using it, administrators can make reliable decisions that will impact social services, traffic, energy and utilities, public safety, retail, communications, and economic development.

Crowd Sensing System for Public Participation

“…The instrument can automatically harvest posts, locations, times, and connections among streams of citizen's data to derive insights on the public intent. This process aligns with a big data and smart city vision as data provide access to localized "Citizen Sensor Networks" to computationally facilitate public participation (Koch et al 2013). Future work will be the critical investigation of these systems, the algorithms applied to these network structures and datasets, and the implications of transitioning to a "coded form" of public participation.…”

Pervasive Crowd Mapping for Dynamic Environments

“…However, these strategies only provide solutions for long term obstacles, failing to dynamicly adapt to the rapid changes in the environment. This is also a gap in previous solutions, as: in crowd participation solutions for Smart Cities and Accessibility [18], [19]; in the identification of problems in the city and their impact [20], [21]; and in building accessibility maps optimising resource allocation [22] and helping people in their everyday life.…”

“…In the last years some solutions of crowd participation in Smart Cities and Accessibility have been explored [18], [19]. These solutions are based on collecting smartphone data, store the data on a server and use models to identify problems in the city and their impact [20], [21]. This information can be used to build accessibility maps, and to define an appropriate action plan to address the detected issues, optimising resource allocation [22] and help people in their everyday life.…”

Monitoramento colaborativo para cidades inteligentes.

“…Na literatura, existem diversos trabalhos que propõem plataformas de propósito geral para o monitoramento colaborativo, suportando a coleta de dados a partir de smartphones (SHETH, 2009;AMINI et al, 2011;KOCH et al, 2013;HU et al, 2013). No entanto, existem diferenças significativas entre as muitas iniciativas atuais.…”

“…Uma vez que cada aspecto individualmente já foi proposto, também, em trabalhos anteriores correlacionados a esse (SHETH, 2009;AMINI et al, 2011;KOCH et al, 2013;HU et al, 2013), a seguir são apresentadas breves descrições sobre cada componente para servir como referência, discutindo-se 52 como cada um deles se relaciona com a taxonomia proposta neste trabalho.…”