Mobile Phone Sensing Broadly Defined
Abstract: The smartphone has emerged as an attractive sensing platform in recent years. This can be attributed to several factors, including rapid adoption of smartphones and their ubiquitous use, several built-in sensors they have (accelerometer, gyroscope, etc.), and ease of application deployment. Nevertheless, the scope of phone based sensing applications is apparently limited by the available set of sensors on the phone. It is in this context that taking a broader perspective on mobile phone sensing and viewing various wireless communication interfaces that are already present (or will be soon) on phones also as sensors can help overcome the above limitation and give rise to newer phone based sensing applications. To support this assertion, I will present a few case studies on environmental sensing; location sensing and network monitoring that rely on wireless communication interfaces on phones.
Short Bio: Mahesh K. Marina is a Lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and subsequently had a two-year postdoctoral stint at UCLA before joining Edinburgh. His current research spans rural/remote wireless access, mobile phone sensing, wireless network management and measurement.