CSR: Small: Data Services for Reliable Crowdsensing in Urban Spaces

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This project develops theory and tools for reliable crowdsensing, aiming to significantly reduce infrastructure investment costs needed to turn urban spaces into future smart cities. Crowdsensing, for purposes of this project, refers to the utilization of the smartest asset in the city - the people - in sharing data on their environment, thereby reducing the need for expensive physical sensors. As an example and living testbed, the work builds a smart transportation application, offering a novel vehicular crowdsensing-based navigation service, called GreenGPS. The novelty of this service is in finding the most fuel-economic routes for drivers, as opposed to the shortest or fastest, saving 10-20% in energy costs according to initial tests. It is estimated that, today, 54% of the world population lives in cities. This percentage will increase to 66% by 2050. City dwellers are the primary stakeholders and beneficiaries of this project. They are the drivers in smart transportation applications, the survivors in disaster response scenarios, and the consumers in energy saving systems. They are in possession of increasingly many sensing platforms, such as cameras, GPS devices, Internet-connected cars, smartphones, and activity monitoring wearable devices. By building the tools that broadly enable smart city applications to rely on opt-in human stakeholders, the project can leverage the pool of their existing sensors to facilitate informed city-scale decision-making in areas like traffic flow, energy consumption, or post-disaster management. A key analytic contribution lies in developing the mathematical foundations for attainment of information reliability guarantees on top of the generally unreliable data that human sources may provide. The project also includes creating educational modules for different levels of undergraduate and graduate instruction on the topic of next generation crowdsensing systems. Combining research and education, the project aims to facilitate evolution of urban spaces into smart cities, while educating future decision-makers and workforce on theory and tools underlying the transition.