Abstracts Category : Other

Mobile Crowd Instrumentation: Design of Surface SolarIrradiance Instrument

by Abhishek Singh

This thesis explores mobile crowd instrumentation adistinct system of data acquisition and mining with the support ofcrowd and instrument (Smartphone). As around from many decades,traditional ways of gathering data were either using physicalhardware input or from human interaction. With compounding both thetechniques, emerges an approach called crowdsourcing, where humansand machine work collectively produce large sums of the analyticaldata. As recent surge in popularity of smartphones equipped withinertial sensors (Such as gyroscope, infrared, ambient lightsensors etc.), which help to collect data without using anyexternal hardware input. Thus, it gives more scope andextensibility of data gathering from an available crowd(humans) notjust from aimed or some specialized crowd.We have developed asystem with mobile crowd instrumentation to map Surface SolarIrradiance i.e. amount of solar energy radiates on one per squaremeter of area. The system works collectively using targetsmartphone sensors data such as camera, gyroscope, accelerometer,GPS, GPRS and mobile clock for computational analysis using mobileprocessing engine and estimate Surface Solar Irradiance. The crowdaddresses this data using crowd mobile application to a cloudserver. The proposed mobile crowd instrumentation systemarchitecture, which incorporates using different cloud server, webservices and APIs helps to interpret data gathered from a mobilecrowd and point to results in mapping Surface Solar Irradiance forone specific region to worldwide region. Conjointly, crowd inputand cloud computing can follow into many complex crowd instrumentswhich can be mapped into different Data source for e.g. mappingworldwide electromagnetic field or map any type of Data collectionsuch as Audio files (e.g. specific sounds or vocals), video files(e.g. videos of specific events), still Images (e.g. Images ofevent or kind) or Human inputs from a specific region toworldwide.As this instrumentation brings more extensibility fordata gathering and analysis to researchers without providing anyexternal source. Also, if the complexity of Data acquisitiontransform, which can also bring more constraints and challenges. Asentire architecture relies on smartphone sensors which can belimited and a crowd, where crowd interaction may produce Humanerrors. Albeit with scope and extensibility of this system canleads to design some Remarkably Complex mobile crowdInstruments.Advisors/Committee Members: Khan, Javed (Advisor).