Nokia's vision of a connected mobile world

A people-centric sensing network would behave much like a self-organizing organic system, with personal data interplaying in fluid and unpredictable ways with environmental, community, and global data. And since the data is organic by nature, it calls to mind an ecosystem more than an architecture—capable of self-assembling dynamically as the data and its constructs shift and expand.

Nokia is supporting the evolution of these data ecosystems through research partnerships with leading institutions. The goal of this open community is to share data, APIs, architectures, and other innovations—generated through autonomous projects—and translate them into application mashups that benefit individuals, communities, and entire populations.

The Participation

Nokia is working with research partners around the world to drive sensor-based projects that make the most of humans being in the loop. On the one hand, these projects are applica-tion specific, working at a local level, sensing things that the participants care about—for example, collecting personal or community data for their direct benefit. At the same time, the projects serve as testbeds for solving large-scale sensor network challenges, such as data analysis and mining, privacy protection, network architectures, and machine learning.

UCLA: Environmental Impact Gets Personal

Researchers at the UCLA Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) have deployed an online tool called Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). With this tool, participants use GPS-enabled phones to regularly and securely upload location data, from which their transportation mode is abstracted and mashed up with GPS data to assess an individual’s environmental impact and exposure.

Extending that idea, CENS is teaming with the Go Green Foundation to introduce a similar application to Silicon Valley teens. Equipped with Nokia phones, kids make pledges to change their behaviour—for example, to use public transportation or ride their bikes. The application uses sensed data to verify their progress and to share it for fun and competition.

CENS is investigating other grass-roots projects as well in which communities can use everyday mobile phones to observe, document, analyze, and query data—for example, about transit routes or neighborhood walkability—and can communicate the aggregated data to build a case for policy change.

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