PoolView: Towards a people centric sensing world

The availability of a wide variety of networked sensing devices in the form of everyday devices such as smartphones, music players, smart residential power meters, sensor embedded gaming systems, and in- vehicle sensing devices will result in the evolution of an embedded Internet. In this scenario, the main role of the Internet and its applications will shift gradually from offering a mere communication medium between end-points to offering information distillation services bridging the gap between the varied data feeds from the sensing devices and human decision needs. In this thesis, we take a step towards the development of an architecture and a data analysis toolset for realizing the above vision of the future Internet. In particular, we focus on a category of sensing, called people centric sensing, where the sensing devices are owned by individuals. We present various novel generic data analysis tools that are necessary to enable people centric sensing applications. We take a systems approach and exemplify these tools by developing and implement- ing prototypes of several people centric sensing applications. We also provide extensive data collection and evaluation for each of the exemplified applications, which show the utility of our architecture