Social Sensing: Challenges with Humans in the Loop

Abstract:
Social sensing is emerging as a promising paradigm for data collection that relies on humans and their sensors to collect observations that enable a myriad of new information services. The paradigm is made possible by the proliferation of sensors that measure location, context, and other data, in the possession of the common individual. The emergence of social sensing offers several challenges, ranging from ensuring data source privacy to fact-finding from noisy data and sources with unknown reliability. This talk describes these research challenges, offers a mathematical formulation of the underlying problems, and presents some analytic solutions that are integrated with social sensing architectures. Sample applications of social sensing are also presented together with initial evaluation and validation results.

Bio:
Dr. Tarek Abdelzaher received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1990 and 1994 respectively. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999 on Quality of Service Adaptation in Real-Time Systems. He has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he founded the Software Predictability Group until 2005. He is currently a Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has authored/coauthored more than 150 refereed publications in real-time computing, distributed systems, sensor networks, and control. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems, and has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, the ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks, and the Ad Hoc Networks Journal. He was Program Chair of RTAS 2004, RTSS 2006, IPSN 2010, ICDCS 2010 and ICAC 2011, as well as General Chair of RTAS 2005, IPSN 2007, RTSS 2007, DCoSS 2008, and Sensys 2008. Abdelzaher's research interests lie broadly in understanding and controlling performance and temporal properties of networked embedded and software systems in the face of increasing complexity, distribution, data dependencies, and degree of embedding in an external physical environment. Tarek Abdelzaher is a member of IEEE and ACM.