The development of ICT infrastructures has facilitated the emergence of new paradigms for looking at society and the environment over the last few years. Participatory environmental sensing, i.e. directly involving citizens in environmental monitoring, is one example, which is hoped to encourage learning and enhance awareness of environmental issues. In this paper, an analysis of the behaviour of individuals involved in noise sensing is presented. Citizens have been involved in noise measuring activities through the WideNoise smartphone application. This application has been designed to record both objective (noise samples) and subjective (opinions, feelings) data. The application has been open to be used freely by anyone and has been widely employed worldwide. In addition, several test cases have been organised in European countries. Based on the information submitted by users, an analysis of emerging awareness and learning is performed. The data show that changes in the way the environment is perceived after repeated usage of the application do appear. Specifically, users learn how to recognise different noise levels they are exposed to. Additionally, the subjective data collected indicate an increased user involvement in time and a categorisation effect between pleasant and less pleasant environments.

We consider the problem of coding labelled trees by means of strings of vertex labels and we present a general scheme to define bijective codes based on the transformation of a tree into a functional digraph. Looking at the fields in which codes for labelled trees are utilized, we see that the properties of locality and heritability are required and that codes like the well known Prüfer code do not satisfy these properties. We present a general scheme for generating codes based on the construction of functional digraphs. We prove that using this scheme, locality and heritability are satisfied as a direct function of the similarity between the topology of the functional digraph and that of the original tree. Moreover, we also show that the efficiency of our method depends on the transformation of the tree into a functional digraph. Finally we show how it is possible to fit three known codes into our scheme, obtaining maximum efficiency and high locality and heritability

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We consider the problem of coding labeled trees by means of strings of node labels. Different codes have been introduced in the literature by Prufer, Neville, and Deo and Micikevicius. For all of them, we show that both coding and decoding can be reduced to integer (radix) sorting, closing several open problems within a unified framework that can be applied both in a sequential and in a parallel setting. Our sequential coding and decoding schemes require optimal O(n) time when applied to n-node trees, yielding the first linear time decoding algorithm for a code presented by Neville. These schemes can be parallelized on the EREW PRAM model. so as to work in O(log n) time with cost O(n), O(n root log n), or O(n log n), depending on the code and on the operation: in all cases, they either match or improve the performances of the best ad hoc approaches known so far. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.