Participate: Pervasive Computing for Mass Participation in Environmental Monitoring

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Participate is a project between the Universities of Nottingham and Bath and industry partners British Telecom, The BBC, Microsoft Research, Science Scope and Blast Theory. The overall aim of the project is to explore how pervasive computing can support nationwide campaigns in which millions of people gather and share information about their local environments, building a country-wide map of environmental issues, raising awareness, and encouraging debate and democracy. By pervasive computing we mean computing that is available to us wherever we go, including the personal devices that we carry with us (our mobile phones and handheld computers) as well as sensors and displays that may be embedded into the environment around us. In our project, this pervasive computing will enable individuals and local groups, including schools, to gather and upload vast quantities of information about their local environments. This will then be sifted by experts and made available to others over the Internet or through television and radio. The result will be a new media format, a mixture of mobile, online and broadcast, that will bring social as well as economic benefits to the UK.In order to realise our vision, we need to develop a new software platform that can integrate different kinds of devices running over a combination of wireless and fixed networks. We then need to integrate sensors and devices with this platform and also create supporting online and broadcast services. As part of this, we will run and study two pilot activities, the first a series of small scale pilots in different locations, and the second a nationwide pilot that builds on these. These activities need to be supported by more fundamental research that will be carried out by the universities and supported by EPSRC. Researchers at the University of Nottingham will develop new and flexible ways of enabling many people to collaborate with many sensors, including exploring whether mobile games can provide a good way of motivating people to take part in the project while collecting useful data as a side effect. The Nottingham team will also develop new techniques to support the storage and querying of data that has been gathered from large numbers of sensors, many of which are mobile. At the same time, the project will provide researchers at the University of Bath with a valuable opportunity to study the impact that these kinds of pervasive technologies have on learning, both within schools and also by the public at large.