Mobile centric wireless sensing

Started during my time at Nokia Research, wireless sensing is an important field of activity in my research, also connecting to the problem of large-scale publish-subscribe (see below). The NORS platform, being developed and eventually open-sourced during my time at Nokia Research, lays ground for a new form of participatory sensing that could potentially involve almost every end user directly through his/her mobile device being carried around. With that, end users directly become part of the provisioning system while still consuming the outcomes of the exercise as new forms of services, such as environmental warnings, traffic re-directs based on end user reports etc. The NORS work intended to combine best practises in sensor networking (using a simple yet efficient publish subscribe system) with modern smart phone technology, enabling the easy and fast integration of future sensors but also the fast developments of applications and services in the system. While the current implementation foresees a centralized application server on a Windows machine, future deployments can easily include servers directly on mobile phones of end users (the current practise of blocking phone-to-phone IP connections in mobile networks makes such deployment hardly likely and we therefore did not undergo the effort to port the server on a mobile platform).

Since 2011, the Android-based AIRS platform has been available, building on the NORS platform with extensions in supported sensors, support for cloud storages, richer UI and much more. AIRS provides a rich recording platform with developer information and more, on which other applications can be built upon. Currently, the Storica companion application as well as the AIRS Ruler application have been developed to showcase what can be built upon such rich personal data. Since 2013, the developments are embedded in TecVis LP, a startup company that I founded together with Dana Pavel. On the TecVis website, you find more information about AIRS, how to use, what you can do with it as well as information about Storica and AIRS Ruler!