Investigators: Jie Gao, PhD
Summary
Ubiquitous sensing, wireless communication and distributed computation have transformed the way we interact with the physical world. In the recent years distributed sensing through smart phones and wearable devices has been integrated to everyday living environments. Smart phones carry many sensors that can be used to monitor human activities and behaviors: sleep quality, driving habits, mobility, to name a few. Smart watches record heart beat rate, which can be used to infer emotional status such as whether the user is in a good mood, stressed, or bored. Smart City initiatives and Open Shared Data Projects enable the collection of data from sensors and cameras at a city scale for modeling user behavior, optimizing for efficiency and energy usage, and for improving safety measures. While we celebrate the convenience and the improved quality of life having smart devices around us, the data collection practices have moved from remote fields to private living environments, to work spaces and homes, and the data collected also shifted from non-sensitive scientific data to personal, sensitive data that is closely related to the user’s health conditions, emotional states, physical activities and social ties.