Participatory Sensing: Building Empowering Surveillance

empowering the oppressed through participatory theater 1

The present article describes participatory theater as a means of empowering audience individuals to lead social change. The focus on participation by oppressed individuals as a means of organizing for social change was recognized as important by scholars and practitioners, especially by the celebrated Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, and the Brazilian theater activist, Augusto Boal. Here we d...

Participatory Sensing

This paper introduces the concept of participatory sensing, which tasks everyday mobile devices, such as cellular phones, to form interactive, participatory sensor networks that enable public and professional users to gather, analyze and share local knowledge. An initial architecture to enhance data credibility, quality, privacy and ‘shareability’ in such networks is described, as well as a cam...

Participatory Sensing

From Participatory Sensing to Participatory Sensemaking

As technological capabilities for capturing, aggregating, and processing large quantities of data continue to improve, the question becomes how to effectively utilise these resources. Whenever automatic methods fail, it is necessary to rely on human background knowledge, intuition, and deliberation. This creates demand for data exploration interfaces that support the analytical process, allowin...

Towards Trustworthy Participatory Sensing

Grassroots Participatory Sensing empowers people to collect and share sensor data using mobile devices across many applications, spanning intelligent transportation, air quality monitoring and social networking. In this paper, we argue that the very openness of such a system makes it vulnerable to abuse by malicious users who may poison the information, collude to fabricate information, or laun...