our vision.

We see a future in which we - individuals, neighbors, friends, and relatives - can use the technology around us to observe, discover, and act on the patterns that shape our lives. Whether your passion is personal or global, whether your interest is in health or the environment, whether you act alone or in a group, Urban Sensing is a new approach that empowers all of us to illuminate and change the world around us.

Encouraged by the same forces that have given rise to Web 2.0 and related trends in social interactivity—affordable personal computers and cameras; pervasive connectivity; and consolidated data centers—you now have ready access to tools that can objectively record, analyze, and discover a variety of significant patterns in your life. Through the use of sensors built into your mobile phone (e.g., cameras, motion sensors, and GPS) and web services that can aggregate and interpret the assembled information, a new collective capacity is emerging: one in which people like you participate in sensing and analyzing aspects of life that were previously invisible.

Fostering a culture of participation
At its heart, Urban Sensing is data collection and interpretation. However, the motivations, processes, and outcomes are all quite different from what you might encounter in a typical university research laboratory. Participatory Urban Sensing emphasizes the involvement of individuals and community groups in the process of sensing and documenting where they live, work, and play. It can range from private, personal observations to the combination of data from hundreds, or even thousands, to reveal patterns across a city. Most importantly, Participatory Urban Sensing begins and ends with people, both as individuals and as members of communities. The type of information collected, and how it is organized and used, may be determined in a traditional manner by a researcher or advocacy group, or in a deliberative manner by the collection of participants themselves. For more ideas, take a look at some of our Urban Sensing projects in action.

Mobilizing today’s technology
Part of Urban Sensing’s appeal is that it supports multiple participation methods to investigate a wide variety of themes. But what really makes it so compelling is that across different use cases and projects the tools and basic steps are consistent. These steps can be summarizes as:

Coordinate > Capture > Transfer > Store > Access > Analyze > Visualize

Each of these steps is made possible by creatively harnessing and extending technologies such as web-based social networking, current and emerging mobile phones, ubiquitous connectivity, central and distributed data centers, robust privacy control mechanisms, and geographic visualization interfaces. Read on to see how our technology is making Urban Sensing possible.

Powerful Innovation
Urban Sensing’s innovation lies in using today’s technologies to observe, document, and act on issues that matter to you. Urban Sensing’s power comes from the already widespread adoption of the technologies by people across so many demographics. Tell us how you would use Urban Sensing to make a difference in your world?