Survey on Citizen Science for Intelligent Transportation Systems Javier J. Sanchez-Medina1 , Manuel J. Galan-Moreno1 , and Enrique Rubio-Royo1 CICEI – ULPGC, Spain,
[email protected]⋆⋆ ,
[email protected],
[email protected]
What is Citizen Science[11]? The Internet development and the wide availability of personal computers, and ubiquitous computing devices have contributed to open many research projects to massive volunteer collaboration. Research projects like the groundbreaking SETI@Home([9]) for the search of extraterrestrial intelligence using idle CPU cycles at people’s computers; the Planets Hunters ([10]) where volunteers help out identifying candidates for planets using data downloaded from Kepler Space Telescope; Whale FM ([7]) where volunteers contribute classifying different dialects of Orca sounds; fighting Malaria([2]) or even Cancer ([1]). Scientific American maintains a survey on some of the most outstanding projects ([5]). All the citizen science project share in common that they use large numbers of volunteer to solve tasks – usually, pattern recognition tasks – that cannot be solved yet by automatic computing based systems. In other words, they use a mixed computers and humans approach to solve hard research problems. Human brain is still unbeatable versus computers at solving pattern recognition tasks. Additionally, the recent wide availability of mobile computing devices, usually equipped with sensing technology, has also influenced deeply the nature of the tasks required to be solved for many citizen science projects. For instance, we can report the presence of any species at a specific GPS position while hiking ([3], [4], [12]) or to report a dangerous parasite infected bee somewhere ([8]). We believe that this new approach to science and technology development can also be applied to research projects on intelligent transportation systems. The purpose of this communication is to provide the elements, potential benefits, possible limitations and some of the already working examples of the application of citizen science to intelligent transportation systems. That application can come in two different ways: as a reporting system, where a volunteer detects and reports a specific environment variable by using an online application; and as moving measurement sampling probes, where the technology included in that ubiquitous computers is used to detect some environment variables without the subjectivity of human beings. Traffic Turk ([6]) is a perfect example for the first flavour of developments, where volunteers, using a smartphone application, report the current traffic sit⋆⋆
J. Sanchez-Medina (corresponding author) is researcher at CICEI and Assistant Professor at DIS (Computer Science Department), at ULPGC, Spain
uation as they experiment it. It has been recently proven during the following days to the hurricane Sandy in Manhattan and surrounding area, providing a really valuable information on the traffic current state in the devastated are, enabling security corps to know in real-time that information and ameliorate the situation as quick as possible. A relevant example of the second category for citizen science project involving mobile devices and its electronic equipment as moving probes is shown in [13]. They use the accelerometer and GPS sensor of mobile phones to detect mobility patterns among users categorizing the transportation mode being used, in order to study how mobility is addressed for a specific zone. These and more will be presented and explained during our communication. But our purpose is also to provoke an interesting discussion among participants on this new topic.
References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
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11. 12.
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Cell slider, https://www.zooniverse.org/project/cellslider Go fight against malaria, http://gofightagainstmalaria.scripps.edu/ inaturalist, http://www.inaturalist.org/ ispot, http://www.ispot.org.uk/ Scientific american citizen science site, http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizenscience/ Traffic turk, http://trafficturk.com/ Whale song project, http://whale.fm/ Zombee watch, https://www.zombeewatch.org/ Anderson, D.P., Cobb, J., Korpela, E., Lebofsky, M., Werthimer, D.: Seti@home: an experiment in public-resource computing. Commun. ACM 45(11), 56–61 (Nov 2002), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/581571.581573 Fischer, D.A., Schwamb, M.E., Schawinski, K., Lintott, C., Brewer, J., Giguere, M., Lynn, S., Parrish, M., Sartori, T., Simpson, R., Smith, A., Spronck, J., Batalha, N., Rowe, J., Jenkins, J., Bryson, S., Prsa, A., Tenenbaum, P., Crepp, J., Morton, T., Howard, A., Beleu, M., Kaplan, Z., vanNispen, N., Sharzer, C., DeFouw, J., Hajduk, A., Neal, J.P., Nemec, A., Schuepbach, N., Zimmermann, V.: Planet hunters: the first two planet candidates identified by the public using the kepler public archive data. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 419(4), 2900–2911 (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.19932.x Hand, E.: Nature 466(7307), 685–687 (August 2010) Mcnicol, D., Mallory, M., Vogel, H.: Using volunteers to monitor the effects of acid precipitation on common loon (gavia immer) reproduction in canada: The canadian lakes loon survey. Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 85, 463–468 (1995), http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00476872 Reddy, S., Mun, M., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., Srivastava, M.: Using mobile phones to determine transportation modes. ACM Trans. Sen. Netw. 6(2), 13:1–13:27 (Mar 2010), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1689239.1689243
