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Constrained data acquisition for mobile citizen science applications

Published: 23 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The popularity and ubiquity of personal mobile computing devices' coupled with their powerful sensing capabilities' allow their application in the structured collection of data for societal benefit and science applications. Citizen scientists are willing users and active contributors to scientific research and applications, but if they gather data in an unconstrained or ad hoc manner, their efforts may be of little scientific value. In this paper, we present a user interface for a mobile device which is properly constrained to permit the gathering of valid scientific data. This helps to achieve the goal that any individual with a basic familiarity of the device (but not of the science) should be able to obtain useful data with little learning required. As a use case for this concept, we present a mobile application that allows user to collect location-stamped images to supplement satellite data for climate change research.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SPLASH '11 Workshops: Proceedings of the compilation of the co-located workshops on DSM'11, TMC'11, AGERE! 2011, AOOPES'11, NEAT'11, & VMIL'11
      October 2011
      358 pages
      ISBN:9781450311830
      DOI:10.1145/2095050
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 23 October 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. citizen scientist
      2. domain-specific modeling
      3. iphone
      4. mobile phone programming

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      • (2025)Toolkit for Educators of Data Science: Using Physical Computing to Support Data Science Education in the ClassroomProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701970(1141-1147)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
      • (2019)Towards Forest Fire Prevention and Combat Through Citizen ScienceNew Knowledge in Information Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-16181-1_85(904-915)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2019
      • (2013)Model-Based Software Synthesis for Self-Reconfigurable Sensor Network in Water MonitoringProceedings of the 20th Annual IEEE International Conference and Workshops on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems10.1109/ECBS.2013.34(40-48)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2013

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