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.

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 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.

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).

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.