BIGDATA: F: Collaborative Research: Acquisition, Collection and Computation of Dynamic Big Sensory Data in Smart Cities

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The ubiquity of information-sensing devices has opened up abundant sources for Big Sensory Data (BSD), which span over Internet of Things, wireless sensor networks, RFID, cyber physical systems, to name a few. Such diverse BSD-rich systems are the building blocks for smart cities where smart devices are deployed in every corner of a city. The analytical use of BSD is essential to smart cities in managing a city's assets and monitoring air conditions, pollution, climate change, traffic, security and safety, etc. The high demand for smart cities and the pivotal role of sensing devices in smart cities accelerate the explosion of BSD. Unfortunately, the size and dynamic nature of BSD overwhelm current capability to capture, store, search, mine and visualize BSD, and hence have become a major hindrance to the widespread development of smart city applications. To tackle these challenges, this project will investigate fundamental issues regarding acquisition, collection and computation of BSD with principled quality control. The goal is to cost-effectively collect and manage BSD for efficient utilization in smart city applications. A set of foundational principles, algorithms and tools for BSD management will be developed in response to the four challenging characteristics of BSD, which are large scale, correlated dynamics, mode diversity and low quality. The outcomes of this research will contribute to the vision of smart and resilient cities, which broadly impact the nation's emerging smart city infrastructure and citizens' mobile quality of life. This project also offers an opportunity to collaborate with the Government of the District of Columbia on the Smarter DC Initiative, and hence impacts not only the research community but also the society at large. This project aims at tackling major challenges in task-cognizant BSD management at the critical phase of data acquisition, collection and computation. The overarching goal is to alleviate the high computational cost and improve the utilization efficiency of BSD in smart city applications. First, approximate BSD acquisition methods will be developed that automatically adjust the sensing frequency based on the changing trend of the physical world. Such acquisition methods can effectively reduce the data volume at an early stage during periodic and long-term monitoring of smart cities. Second, approximate sampling algorithms, knowledge discovery methods, and integration methods will be developed for task-specific multimodal BSD, in order to reduce the transmission cost associated with delivering otherwise raw and redundant BSD from sensing devices to end users. Finally, new metrics for evaluating BSD quality will be investigated and then applied to properly assess the tolerance of low-quality BSD and provide deep understanding of the fundamental impact of data quality on various design aspects of BSD acquisition, collection and computation. Besides theoretical analysis, simulation and experimental studies will be carried out on real BSD, including experimentation on real-world Smart City projects at Washington DC. The corresponding code, datasets, and educational materials will be released via a dedicated project website.