JUSense: A Unified Framework for Participatory-based Urban Sensing System

Participatory sensing has become an effective way of sensing urban dynamics due to the widespread availability of smartphones among citizens. Traditionally, separate urban sensing applications are designed to monitor different urban dynamics like environment, transportation, mobility, etc. However, combining these applications to aggregate information can lead to various new inferences. The main objective of this work is to improve urban sensing applications by overcoming their individual limitations. A unified framework called JUSense (Judicious Urban Sensing) is proposed that can derive benefits from these applications by combining their functionalities. JUSense provides the opportunity for applications to tackle the challenges associated with data collection, aggregation of data in cloud, calibration, data cleaning, and prediction. A multi-view fusion model is proposed for spatiotemporal urban air and noise pollution map generation. Further, a random forest classifier is built to classify the driving events. Here, large scale experiments are performed to evaluate the efficacy of JUSense on real-world dataset. Both the fusion model and the random forest classifier yield better accuracies compared to the baseline methods. Additionally, case studies are conducted to show the advantages that can arise out of the mutual interactions among the applications.