The science magazine New Scientist had a nice piece on two research projects strictly connected with - when not an outcome of – the everyAware project, as they involve two partners of it (UCL and ISI). A quoting from Jerome Lewis‘ interview captures quite the whole sense of everyAware (although he talks about forests, not cities):
“As climate change starts to affect the rising and falling of water in the forest, animals become difficult to find and as is the predictability of the arrival of fruits and insects. This has been dramatically affected by climate change, [...] Mapping changes over time will allow the forest people to start to notice the regularities that might emerge as things change. In theory you can start to adapt your behaviour to take account of that”.
You can read the rest of the article here.
The 2012 edition of the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit has been recently announced. It will take place in London from 16 to 18 February 2012, and some leading figures of worldwide citizen science projects have already confirmed their attendance there. The proposal for papers and talks should be submitted here. The announced three-day program looks fascinating: one day with great speakers, one day for technical discussions and a project showcase, and a last day for hackers, with unconference sessions, prototypes and awards. Of course, there is a twitter account to be followed.
A new interesting article on volunteered “GIS systems, OpenStreetMap and all that stuff is out, whose long long title is “Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and Sensor Web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples”. It is authored (among others) by Maged N. Kamel Boulos and its group at of Plymouth University, who is himself the editor-in-chief of the journal. Quoting from the abstract, it is an “in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, “noise”, misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.”
It is worth a read, most of all for non-experts in the field. But the publishing journal is as interesting as the paper: “International Journal of Health Geographics”: the idea of crossing geography and health research fields sounds quite intriguing. It is perfectly suited to disseminate the recent initiatives using GIS systems to deal with epidemics, natural disasters and healthcare campaigns. And it is good to know that it is an open access, peer review journal. It just casts a doubt to me: should a peer-reviewed journal publish articles authored by its editor?
Citizen science projects grow in number and in relevance everyday. As research funding and credibility risk to be undermined by the current crisis, professional scientists should be happy about this new trend: lots of people ask them to collaborate to specific science problems and help them in a way or another. Unfortunately, scientists do not pay much attention at their voluntary colleagues. According to a recent survey,
when scientists were asked about volunteers‟ motivations, most did not recognize volunteers‟ prevalent motivations. They mentioned motivations stemming from “wanting to be outside”, “wanting to do something meaningful”, and “working with their friends or family [on scientific projects]”
This is not a good starting point for a successful citizen-scientist collaboration: citizens involve themselves into scientific projects because they primarily want to be “inside”, not “outside”. If experts refuse to recognize motivations and roles of citizens, their relationship remains a hierarchical one. Nothing more than science as usual.
An excerpt from one of the most exciting call for papers i have received recently:
This session is interested in people, places and cultures that have for various reasons been overlooked, regarded as old-fashioned or too readily classed as mundane, non-spectacular, even ‘amateur’. Papers will discuss a culture of exploration that involves romance, revery, memory, as well as political purpose and physical endeavour, and incorporates fieldwork carried out at weekends, on the off-chance or as part of daily life. Focusing on landscapes of exploration in the city, suburbia, and/or the rural, places that are inhabited, cared for and preserved, practices and techniques based upon archaeology, local history and architectural significance, this session offers an opportunity to challenge how geographers have examined people’s understandings of the world, their place within it, and their fascination for it.
The Everyaware team will participate to the “Second Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds” (within NIPS2011) with a presentation of Experimental Tribe:
“Experimental Tribe (ET) is a platform for web-based experiments and social computation. It is
currently available in beta version at www.xtribe.eu. ET is aimed at both gathering otherwise
separate efforts to use web resources for scientific purposes and at providing the community with a
tool to design experiments on the web, bypassing much of the “hard work”. The benefit is twofold:
on the one hand, it allows virtually any researcher to realize his own experiment with minimal effort,
paving the way of the use of the web as a standard “laboratory” to perform experiments. On the
other hand, it can be a strong “basin of attraction” for people willing to participate to experiments,
making in this way recruitment much more easier than for single-experiment platforms.”
(from Cicali et al., “Experimental tribe: a general platform for web-gaming and social computation”).
At the Eye On Earth Summit, a special working group has been devoted to crowdsourcing for environmental purposes. The White Paper introducing the discussion is a very clear presentation of the field, and it is useful for a broad audience – from citizens interested into the potential of social media to scientists writing their next grant’s proposal. You can download it here. At some point, the paper reads:
“People are much more likely to engage in sharing valuable data for assessing the status of or changes in their environment if they are able to so using technologies they use every day. This suggests that laptops, cell phones, and vehicles should all be employed as potential interface and/or sensing devices for the collection of environmental data and its documentation.”
Apparently, the best we can do so far in this field is collecting data and visualizing them using websites, apps, maps etc. It is a very important and exciting task, but it still leaves to the user’s brain the task of processing the depicted data and translate them into novel behaviors and strategies. Of course, the policy makers are supposed to do that, but their analysis skills are often poor. There is another option: we could provide these websites, apps, maps etc. with powerful analysis tools producing recommendations to the users toward clearly stated purposes such as reducing emissions, water waste, pollution to given levels. Scientists do not like this option, since they believe themselves to be neutral and the public to appreciate it. But are we sure we prefer neutral scientists, rather than politically oriented scientist telling us what to do to reach a transparent goal using all the possibilities made available by social media?
Dozens of new citizen science projects are generated daily. Most of them include beautiful maps, fair amounts of crowdsourced data, amazing visualization tools. But how many of these projects provide a really good representation of the monitored projects? In other words: we can ask birdwatchers to monitor birds’ migration paths, but are we really going to get a realistic map?
As multiple crisis of natural and human source hit Italy, the country becomes a natural playground to test and apply crowdsourcing techniques for emergency prevention and management. In a meeting in Bologna recent developments in this area will be discussed.
Crisis and disasters have played a major role in the recent development of participatory sensing and the use of citizens as sensors: Ushahidi was born to crowdmap political turmoils, and the Fukushima nuclear accident has brought Pachube to the public attention. Nowadays, the word “crisis” often appears close to the word “Italy”. Riots, flood, earthquake and other natural disasters take place with regularity in the “Belpaese”. This astonishing record could make Italy a beautiful playground for distributed crisis management and crowdmapping.
Well, something of the kind is already happening. The most popular news site, repubblica.it, often uses Ushahidi’s platform crowdmap to represent data to the users and invite them to participate. Crisis management through web2.0 tools is relatively developed in Italy, and some interesting project has already been realized and other are supposed to appear soon. A community has been born to share knowledge and expertise; you can meet all this people next Saturday, november 19 in Bologna, from 10 am, at the Crisis Camp Italy – nothing to see with the anti-crisis #occupysomething initiatives. The Camp has been organised after the Paris european meeting by a bunch of people led by Elena Rapisardi, whose project on forest fire monitoring is explained in this nice presentation. The whole program of the Camp can be found on the Crisis Camp website.
Another recommendation for you. Sadly enough, scientific literature on citizen science are rarely freely available for the citizens…
Participatory Sensing: Crowdsourcing Data from Mobile Smartphones in Urban Spaces
by Salil S. Kanhere
The recent wave of sensor-rich, Internet-enabled, smart mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone has opened the door for a novel paradigm for monitoring the urban landscape known as participatory sensing. Using this paradigm, ordinary citizens can collect multi-modal data streams from the surrounding environment using their mobile devices and share the same using existing communication infrastructure (e.g., 3G service or WiFi access points). The data contributed from multiple participants can be combined to build a spatiotemporal view of the phenomenon of interest and also to extract important community statistics. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and the high density of people in metropolitan areas, participatory sensing can achieve an unprecedented level of coverage in both space and time for observing events of interest in urban spaces. Several exciting participatory sensing applications have emerged in recent years. For example, GPS traces uploaded by drivers and passengers can be used to generate real time traffic statistics. Similarly, street-level audio samples collected by pedestrians can be aggregated to create a citywide noise map. In this advanced seminar, we will provide a comprehensive overview of this new and exciting paradigm and outline the major research challenges
EveryAware is an EU project intending to integrate environmental monitoring, awareness enhancement and behavioral change by creating a new technological platform combining sensing technologies, networking applications and data-processing tools.
