Citizen Science

Abstract

In this chapter, we present an important new shift in mobile phone usage—from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument.” We explore how these new “personal instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. We investigate how such citizen science can be used collectively across neighborhoods and communities to enable individuals to become active participants and stakeholders as they publicly collect, share, and remix measurements of their city that matter most to them. We further demonstrate the impact of this new participatory urbanism by detailing its usage within the scope of environmental awareness. Inspired by a series of field studies, user driven environmental measurements, and interviews, we present the design of a working hardware system that integrates air quality sensing into an existing mobile phone and exposes the citizen authored measurements to the community—empowering people to become true change agents.

Trust-but-Verify: Guaranteeing the Integrity of User-generated Content in Online Applications

“…For example, carbon monoxide studies in Ghana, Accra used an additional device attached to the phone [97]. Furthermore, the TSP can be connected to a legacy mobile device, as such it is possible to deploy a trustworthy crowd-sourced sensing application without the cooperation of smart phone OEMs such as Apple or Nokia.…”

Common Sense Community: Scaffolding Mobile Sensing and Analysis for Novice Users

“…A number of projects have mapped air quality data using mobile sensors, typically with an emphasis on improving environmental awareness [9][17] [26]. Some have taken creative approaches to presenting and collecting this data through artful visual presentation [6], provocative platforms [7], and gameplay [2].…”

“…We also thank Rob Ennals and Lora Oehlberg for their helpful discussions and comments and acknowledge Ron Cohen, Prabal Dutta, RJ Honicky, Alan Mainwaring, Chris Myers, Eric Paulos, Paul Wooldridge, and our study participants for their valuable contributions to this work. Common Sense builds in part on the Participatory Urbanism [26] and N-SMARTS [15] projects.…”

Community Memories for Sustainable Urban Living

“…Indeed physical measurement data only tell one side of the story, and need to be augmented with subjective, qualitative data that trace out the environment as experienced by individuals. 2 The bottleneck here is that existing techniques based on survey forms or interviews by social scientists, do not yield enough data to be representative on a large-scale. Furthermore because this data is collected separately it is hard to align it with physical measurement data.…”