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
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
• 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
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
• 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:
“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:
“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:
“Good smart" and "bad smart"
• 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?
“Good smart" and "bad smart"
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"
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Information acquisition
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Information acquisition
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Bull. Korean Chem. Soc. 2012, Vol. 33, No. 2
Information acquisition
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Sensors 2011, 11, 7055-7062
Information delivery
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Information delivery
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Information delivery
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
Information processing
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
• 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
Luigi Ceccaroni - Crowdsourcing and smartphone technology
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