Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology 2013 03 18

Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology

Luigi Ceccaroni, Senior member of research staff Blue Photonics 2013, Texel (NL), March 18, 2013

• Citizens as environmental data consumers• Monitoring tackled by scientists or policy makers alone

• Expensive• Hard to use technology• Quantity, coverage?• High quality• Sustainable?

• Citizens as environmental data creators and consumers• Monitoring tackled by scientists, policy makers and citizens

• Low cost• Easy to use technology• Quantity, coverage?• Quality?• Sustainable

Introduction

Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology

• The proliferation of cheap, powerful sensors• Commonplace objects understanding what we do with them

The convergence of two trends


• The proliferation of cheap, powerful sensors• Commonplace objects understanding what we do with them

• Our personal identities firmly connected to our profiles on social networks

The convergence of two trends


• How to create peer pressure?• Recycle and impress your (Facebook) friends, or don't recycle

and risk incurring their wrath• Share your weight with your Twitter followers; it will help you

to stick to a diet• Monitor the environment and impress your friends, or don't

monitor the environment and…???• Like a videogame, with points for doing good?

• Why create peer pressure?

• We are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. Well, we shouldn’t be…

Interaction made “social”

• Social engineering disguised as product engineering• From smart cars to smart sensors, "smart" as the shorthand

for transforming present-day social reality• Smart technologies becoming more intrusive• Risk of undermining our autonomy by supporting behaviors

that someone somewhere has deemed desirable:• Smart forks informing us that we are eating too fast• Smart toothbrushes urging us to spend more time brushing our

teeth• Smart sensors in our cars telling us we drive too fast• Smartphones telling us which beach is better for us

• Devices giving us useful feedback • But also sharing everything they know about our habits with

institutions whose interests may be different from our own

The social-engineering context

The social-engineering context

• “Good smart“: Devices leaving us in complete control of the situation and seek to enhance our decision-making by providing more information:• An Internet-jacked kettle alerting us when the national power

grid is overloaded • Not preventing us from boiling yet another cup of tea, but adding

an extra ethical dimension to that choice

• A grocery cart scanning the bar codes of products we put into it, informing us of their nutritional benefits and country of origin

• Enhancing—rather than impoverishing—our autonomy

• An application to contribute to ocean-color research, coupling color to the most important life form in the water, the phytoplankton, and informing about the ocean’s health

• What’s in it for me? Education, pollution, sediments…• Is it sustainable? Public, private, artists…

“Good smart" and "bad smart"

• “Bad smart“: Technologies making certain choices and behaviors impossible; smart gadgets seeking to limit, not to expand, what we can do: • Facial recognition technologies confirming we are who we say

we are…• We must resist attempts to universalize this logic:


• Is the BinCam “good” or “bad”?• Not forced to recycle • Appealing to our base instincts:

• Must earn gold bars and rewards! • Must “compete” with others! • Must win and impress friends!

• Not treating us as autonomous human beings, capable of weighing the options by ourselves

• Allowing a recommendation system or Facebook or the government to do our thinking for us

• What about crowdsourcing systems involving people on holiday (scuba diving, on cruise, on the beach) in data collection?


Applications

Smartphones, water color and Forel-Ule

Applications

• Do application designers know precisely how we should behave, so the only problem is finding the right incentive?

• A truly smart crowdsourcing system should make us reflect on our environmental habits and contribute to conscious deliberation:• Letting us benchmark our usual swimming waters against

other waters in our area, instead of trying to shame us with point deductions and peer pressure

• The task of technology should not be to liberate us from problem-solving.

• We need to enroll smart technology in helping us with problem-solving.

• Maybe… in promoting problem solving with a monitoring twist

Smart crowdsourcing

Smart crowdsourcing

• Improvement of scuba-diving activities• Ranking the best beaches• Early-warning systems for HABs and bio-chemical hazards• Monitoring swell and length of waves• Water transparency via phone pictures and Secchi disc• Retrieval of sensor measurements from low-cost moorings

Applications, applications

• Monitoring and…• Mobile devices as sensor platforms• Georeferencing • Education through citizens’ effective participation• Community involvement• Internet-distribution and social platforms to observe and then

share:• Photos (ocean color, transparency)• Oil spills• Algal blooms

• Recommendation• Decision support

From current monitoring to "participatory environmental science"


Information acquisition




Bull. Korean Chem. Soc. 2012, Vol. 33, No. 2



Sensors 2011, 11, 7055-7062

Information delivery


Information processing


• Standardization, interoperability• GIS and satellite-data processing, integration and

interpretation• Data-quality validation in real-time

• Taking into account position, orientation and temperature

• Context-awareness• Data provided in a more or less voluntary, active or conscious

way• Metadata and context data: time, location, name, instrument

• Personalisation• Location• Social environment• Profile and personal history

Acquisition, processing, delivery: a new way


http://www.citclops.eu/

http://www.coastwatch.org/

http://creekwatch.researchlabs.ibm.com/

http://mwater.co/

http://www.wasserlebnis.de/

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/fw_riv/rv_main.html

http://projectbaseline.org

http://crowd.cs.umass.edu/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science

http://senseable.mit.edu/

http://research.cens.ucla.edu/aquatic/

http://www.secchidipin.org/

http://www.earthobservations.org/geo_me_201211_geo9_ec.shtml

http://www.nurp.noaa.gov/Spotlight/Observatory.htm

http://marine.rutgers.edu/mrs/LEO/LEO15.html

http://root.ew.eea.europa.eu/lltk/papers-citizen-science-and-lltk/graham_et_al_eos_2011-2-.pdf

Resources

Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology

Luigi Ceccaroni, Senior member of research staff Blue Photonics 2013, Texel (NL), March 18, 2013

Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology 2013 03 18

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