Course Description

Commercial mobile devices with embedded sensors are becoming increasingly popular. There are already several examples of mobile applications that utilize and share information generated by a community of users (e.g., Whrrl, Loopt, Cenceme). The goal of this project-oriented seminar is to first understand the specific challenges of community sensing and then to build a community-based system that harnesses sensor data collected by multiple devices. We will primarily focus on developing: (i) systems and networking techniques to support community-sensing and (ii) machine-learning techniques to learn the behavior and context of the user both individually and collectively.

Students will be required to develop on the iPhone and/or the Mobile Sensing Platform (a custom wearable sensing platform). These platforms will be used to collect sensor data as a group all throughout the quarter. Because this is not a programming course students will need to be motivated to quickly gain sufficient iPhone programming expertise mostly through self study.  The first part of the seminar will involve reading and presenting research papers and brainstorming (Tuesday session), as well as gaining programing experience through a series of iPhone/MSP programming assignments, and learning necessary machine learning concepts (Thursday session). 

The focus of the second half of the seminar will be on developing cooperative techniques for sensing and modeling that would lead to more efficient data collection, more accurate inference, and richer applications for mobile systems. The project phase will require a substantial amount of programming, collection and analysis of sensor data, therefore, require a significant time commitment on the part of students. In essence, we plan to delve into this new field and discover new research problems and techniques to solve these problems. We plan to quickly come up with a holistic project that combines distributed sensing and community-based statistical reasoning techniques and results in a compelling application. 

Administration