Characterization is a crucial step in the study of properties of nanomaterials to evaluate their full potential in applications. Carbon nanotube-based materials have properties that are sensitive to size, shape, concentration, and agglomeration state. It is therefore critical to quantitatively characterize these factors in situ, while the processing takes place. Traditional characterization techniques that rely on microscopy are often time consuming and in most cases provide qualitative results. Spectroscopy has been studied as an alternative tool for identifying, characterizing, and studying these materials in situ and in a quantitative way. In this paper, we provide a critical review of the spectroscopy techniques used to explore the surface properties (e.g., dispersion) characteristics of carbon nanotubes in aqueous suspensions during the sonication process.

Nairobi is one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities and a major business and technology powerhouse in Africa. However, Nairobi currently lacks monitoring technologies to obtain reliable data on traffic and road infrastructure conditions. In this paper, we investigate the use of mobile crowdsourcing as means to gather and document Nairobi's road quality information. We first present the key findings of a city-wide road quality survey about the perception of existing road quality conditions in Nairobi. Based on the survey's findings, we then developed a mobile crowdsourcing application, called CommuniSense, to collect road quality data. The application serves as a tool for users to locate, describe, and photograph road hazards. We tested our application through a twoweek field study amongst 30 participants to document various forms of road hazards from different areas in Nairobi. To verify the authenticity of user-contributed reports from our field study, we proposed to use online crowdsourcing using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to verify whether submitted reports indeed depict road hazards. We found 92% of usersubmitted reports to match the MTurkers judgements. While our prototype was designed and tested on a specific city, our methodology is applicable to other developing cities.

In this poster, we present a mobile crowdsourcing application, called Afya Ya Barabara (AYB) (which means road health in Kiswahili). The application serves 2 major roles: First is to collect and visualize data on road surface conditions in Nairobi. Second role is as a citizen engagement platform to raise awareness on the state of road conditions in Nairobi using Twitter hashtags. The focus of this work is to discuss how AYB is employed to promote citizen engagement. Nairobi is one of the most active cities in East Africa in terms of Twitter usage. This guided our decision to employ Twitter as a social engagement tool. The demand for more systematic citizen engagement and public participation in the governance of developing cities is growing. As government budgets are becoming increasingly tight, new ways of addressing road maintenance problems are required. Public governance in developing countries faces accountability issues that allow corruption and poor service delivery to seethe. Lack of information and citizen engagement perpetuates such tendencies. We propose Afya Ya Barabara as an engagement platform that will expand the capacity of municipalities and its citizens to better monitor road conditions using mobile technology.