Written by three researchers from Microsoft Research India, this article explores the idea of using smartphones to monitor road conditions such as potholes, bumps and chaotic traffic conditions. The authors speculate that systems that "piggyback" on smartphone technology could replace the need for traditional traffic monitoring infrastructure, which is expensive, especially for developing countries. The article presents an evaluation of one such system they developed called Nericell, based on experiments they conducted on the streets of Bangladore.
The article explains that Nericell differs to previous systems, which could only monitor speed and location information. Nericell instead uses a phone's microphone, GPS and accelerometer, "to glean rich information, e.g. the quality of the road or the noisiness of traffic".
Like my chosen article, this one states openly that providing incentives for participants is an important issue that is yet to be explored for this technology. Instead, the article focuses on the technical aspects of harnessing a phone's GPS, microphone and accelerometer to give an accurate depiction of the road conditions.
While this rather technical article provides the least insight of the five articles in terms of the cultural aspects of mobile crowd-sourcing, I chose it because it describes a use of crowd-sourcing which is a) arguably the most widely applicable in a global sense, and b) likely to be one of the best-supported of its kind. Both are owing to the ubiquity of roads and motorists.
Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V. and Ramjee, R. (2008) Nericell: Rich Monitoring of Road and Traffic Conditions using Mobile Smartphones. SenSys '08 Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems: India
(I'm doing mobile phone crowd-sourcing)
Written by three researchers from Microsoft Research India, this article explores the idea of using smartphones to monitor road conditions such as potholes, bumps and chaotic traffic conditions. The authors speculate that systems that "piggyback" on smartphone technology could replace the need for traditional traffic monitoring infrastructure, which is expensive, especially for developing countries. The article presents an evaluation of one such system they developed called Nericell, based on experiments they conducted on the streets of Bangladore.
The article explains that Nericell differs to previous systems, which could only monitor speed and location information. Nericell instead uses a phone's microphone, GPS and accelerometer, "to glean rich information, e.g. the quality of the road or the noisiness of traffic".
Like my chosen article, this one states openly that providing incentives for participants is an important issue that is yet to be explored for this technology. Instead, the article focuses on the technical aspects of harnessing a phone's GPS, microphone and accelerometer to give an accurate depiction of the road conditions.
While this rather technical article provides the least insight of the five articles in terms of the cultural aspects of mobile crowd-sourcing, I chose it because it describes a use of crowd-sourcing which is a) arguably the most widely applicable in a global sense, and b) likely to be one of the best-supported of its kind. Both are owing to the ubiquity of roads and motorists.
Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V. and Ramjee, R. (2008) Nericell: Rich Monitoring of Road and Traffic Conditions using Mobile Smartphones. SenSys '08 Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems: India