An architecture for socially mobile collaborative sensing and its implementation

We introduce the concept of "socially mobile collaborative sensing" (SMOCS), a collaborative process in which devices owned by different users gather and share contextual data and derive inferences. People are increasingly gathering contextual data (e.g. location [38]) for their own use and are beginning to share it through systems such as Twitter and Google Latitude. These systems are domain specific (they are designed for a single data type) and require all users to gather their context themselves; users must install software on a device capable of gathering rich contextual data (e.g. a smartphone). The SMOCS architecture enables users with less-capable devices to offload contextual sensing and reporting to physically proximate more-capable devices; in this way, SMOCS defines a truly viral architecture. Using collaboration among devices that are found in the neighborhood of a mobile user to gather contextual data is now practical. The density of reachable devices in any particular person's neighborhood is growing with time. SMOCS is motivated by the need to structure such collaborations to support viral growth and evolution of applications that exploit such sensing. In this thesis we define SMOCS and present an architecture and an implementation, called ContInt (Context Interleaving). The ContInt implementation is composed of two components: Ego, a distributed social network in which users maintain personally-owned "agents", and the ContInt plugin for Ego.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Amick, Charles William Hawthorne

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David P. Reed.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/53124

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/53124