Vision | News | Application | Screenshot & Demo | Research Papers & Slides | People | SyNRG
Vision
Modern phones are being equipped with numerous sensors such as cameras, microphones, GPS, accelerometers, and health monitors. This project aims to design a "Virtual Information Telescope", where the "lenses" of the telescope are metaphors for the sensors in people's mobile phones. Using such a telescope, an Internet user will be able to zoom into any part of the populated world, and observe events of interest. Users will be able to direct queries to phones located in a given region, and receive real-time responses through automatic sensing or explicit human participation. Example domains that may benefit from this platform include education, healthcare, tourism, disaster management, environment conservation, and social collaborations. Perhaps more fundamentally, a virtual information telescope may change the way we browse, query, learn, and process information. The following figure grahically illustrates this vision.
Application
We
developed Micro-Blog as one instance of this vision. Users are
encouraged to record multimedia
blogs on-the-fly, enriched with inputs from other physical sensors. The
blogs are geo-tagged and uploaded to a remote server that positions
these blogs on a spatial platform (e.g., Internet maps). Distributed
clients can zoom into any part of the map and query selected regions
for desired information. Queries are serviced either through explicit
human participation, or automatic physical sensing. Imagine querying
people at any place on this world, and getting real-time responses.
Micro-Blog Screenshot. Visit Micro-Blog Beta Demo here
Research Threads and Papers
Slides:
- Micro-Blog slides (presented @ MobiSys 2008)
Overall System Development:
Micro-Blog implemented on Nokia N95 mobile phones using Carbide C++
SDK. The server is implemented using Apache Webserver, MySQL Database,
programmed in the platform of C++, PHP, Ajax, etc. Research challenges idenfied.
- Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content through Mobile Phones and Social Participation, Shravan Gaonkar, Jack Li, Romit Roy Choudhury, Landon Cox, Al Schmidt, ACM MobiSys, June 2008.
- Micro-Blog: Mapcasting from Mobile Phones to Virtual Sensor Maps, Shravan Gaonkar, Romit Roy Choudhury, ACM Mobicom/MobiHoc, Demo, Sep 2007 and ACM Sensys, Demo, Nov 2007.
- VUPoints: Collaborative Video Recording through Mobile Phones, Xuan Bao, Romit Roy Choudhury, ACM MobiHeld 2009 (ACM SigComm workshop).
Energy-Efficient Localization:
GPS
offers good localization accuracy, but is energy-hungry. WiFi
fingerprinting improves battery lifetime at the cost of higher
localization error. GSM triangulation pushes this tradeoff to the
further extreme. Its necessary to design energy-efficient localization
schemes that achieve the best of both worlds (high accuracy and low energy).
- EnLoc: Energy Efficient Localization for Mobile Phones,
Ionut Constandanche, Matt Sayler, Shravan Gaonkar, R. Roy Choudhury, L. Cox, IEEE Infocom Mini Conference, April 2009.
Symbolic Localization through Context Sensing:
Alternate
localization needs to be context aware, else, slight localization error
can place a phone in a grocery store as opposed to its actual location
in an adjacent coffee shop. Applications such as location specific
advertisement can be affected. Hence, localization needs to be symbolic (i.e., contextual). We are
exploring the use of accelerometer, light sensors, sound sensors, and compasses to
fingerprint locations and then localize phones based on such
fingerprints.
- AAMPL: Accelerometer Augmented Mobile Phone Localization, Andrew Ofstad, Emmett Nicholas, Rick Szcodronski, Romit Roy Choudhury, ACM MELTS workshop (with Mobicom 08), September, 2008.
- SurroundSense: Mobile Phone Localization using Ambient Sound and Light, Martin Azizyan, Romit Roy Choudhury, Poster, ACM MobiCom 2008 (Winner of ACM Student Research Competition)
Location Privacy:
Location based applications must preserve user privacy and yet ensure that the quality of location-based services (i.e., the relevance of the reponses to a specific query, as well as the timeliness) does not degrade.- Realtime Location Privacy Via Mobility Prediction: Creating Confusion at Crossroads, Joseph Meyerowitz, Romit Roy Choudhury, ACM HotMobile, 2009
- CacheClock: Preseving Location Privacy throgh Stochastic Mobility Prediction, Joseph Meyerowitz, Romit Roy Choudhury, Poster, ACM MobiCom 2008
User Interfacing:
Mobile phones have to be simpler to use, particularly its user interfaces. A first step is to provide an easy way of inputing information ... a better alternative to typing. We are exploring the use of mobile phone accelerometers that will allow a user to use the phone as a pen to write in the air.- PhonePoint Pen: Using Mobile Phones to Write on Air, Sandip Agrawal, Ionut Constandache, Shravan Gaonkar, Romit Roy Choudhury, ACM MobiHeld 2009 (ACM SigComm workshop).
People
Romit Roy Choudhury (Asst. Prof., Duke)
Ionut Constandanche (Ph.D Student, Duke)
Xuan Bao (M.S. Student, Duke)
Shravan Gaonkar (Ph.D Student, UIUC)
Matt Sayler (M.S. Student, Duke)
Martin Azizyan (Junior, Duke)
Sandip Agrawal (Junior, Duke)
Zachary Cancio (Junior, Duke)
Jack Li (Sophomore, Duke)
Joseph Meyerowitz (Junior, Duke)
Andrew Ofstad (Duke ECE, class of 2008)
Emmett Nicholas (Duke ECE, class of 2008)
Rick Szcodronski (Duke ECE, class of 2008)
Collaborators
Landon Cox (Asst. Prof., Duke)
Al Schmidt (Verizon)
Niloy Ganguly (Asst. Prof., IIT Kharagpur, India)
Contact
Please email Romit Roy Choudhury (romit@ee.duke.edu) for more information.