Nokia's vision of a connected mobile world

The Owl Project at MIT’s Media Lab has established a community for interacting with owls in the forests of Maine and Connecticut. Using cell phones equipped with GPS, compasses, and directional microphones, Audubon volunteers can emit a variety of owl sounds and listen to the responding hoots—recording directional, atmospheric, and TDOA (time difference on arrival) data.

The original idea, initiated by visiting MIT professor Dale Joachim, was to use technology to replace on-the-spot human field researchers. But now he sees the advantages of a hybrid approach. For example, people can sense the direction of sounds just by turning their heads—more efficient than using microphone arrays—and can make observations informed by experience. As a result, part of Joachim’s research has to do with comparing data collected by technology with data collected by note-taking citizen-researchers. Following on the Owl Project, Joachim has signed up for several international collaborations for observing nature across long distances.

The Upshot

The vision of ubiquitous human-carried sensor networks challenges the fundamentals of current network technologies. In order to manage transmissions from trillions of sensors collecting vastly varied data (multiplying over many years), the solution must be intelligent, open, modular, and rapidly scalable. Interoperability among devices, systems, and services must be assured, with clear interfaces and boundaries of privacy and security.

Privacy and User Data

Opportunistic people-centric sensing heightens existing concerns about data privacy. Nokia is doing research on various privacy-enhancing technologies. For example, the need to provide sensitive data could be minimized and control mechanisms could be applied on the subsequent usage of the sensitive data. Even as Nokia, UCLA, Dartmouth, and others focus research on privacy-aware architectures that protect sensitive personal information, there persists a slippery notion of data ownership and identity. The interest of Nokia is in opening the debate among policies and viewpoints, toward a common understanding of users’ rights to control their data and its use.

Shaping a New Architecture

Interoperability among public, commercial, and user-created sensor networks (and among the sensors themselves) demands a robust, standards-based platform. We imagine an open service architecture—with normalization of data syntax, protocols, sampling, and query models—that blends cloud and client-server computing into a single abstraction layer. As the ecosystem takes shape, with flexible and modular technology assets, Internet-type mashup development can proliferate, along with applications and services that will provide immeasurable value in both established and emerging markets.

...continued