Users as reconfigurable elements in distributed sensing applications

Next generation sensing applications will be large-scale with multiple human actors, including: administrators, application developers, participatory sensing volunteers and consumers of sensor data. In these sensing scenarios, both human actors and software artefacts should be reconfigurable at runtime. A middleware solution for this class of sensing application should provide a relationship amongst equals, wherein human actors and software artefacts may be explicitly configured and reconfigured using a single consistent development model. In recent years, Online Social Networks have proven to be a successful and popular mechanism through which millions of people have created digital representations of themselves and their relationships. We combine a reconfigurable component model with online social networks to create a middleware that allows software and human actors to be composed into reconfigurable distributed applications. This allows developers to create dynamic sensing applications with the human explicitly in the loop.