Database Reference
In-Depth Information
This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly discusses some
key technological advances which have occurred in recent years, which
have enabled the design of such dynamic and embedded applications.
Section 3 discusses a broad overview of the key system design questions
which arise in these different contexts. One of the important issues
discussed in this section is privacy, which is discussed in even greater
detail in a later section. Section 4 discusses some important privacy
issues which arise in the context of social networks with embedded sen-
sors. Section 5 discusses the trust-worthiness issues which arise in such
crowd-sourcing systems. Section 6 introduces techniques for social net-
work modeling from dynamic links which are naturally created by the
sensor-based scenario. Since such dynamic modeling often requires tra-
jectory mining techniques, we present methods for trajectory mining in
section 7. Section 8 introduces some of the key applications associated
with social sensing. Section 9 discusses the conclusions and research
directions.
2. Technological Enablers of Social Sensing
A number of recent technological advances in hardware and software
have enabled the integration of sensors and social networks. One such
key technological advance is the development is small mobile sensors
which can collect a variety of user-specific information such as audio or
video. Many of the applications discussed are based on
user-location
.
Such location can easily be computed with the use of mobile GPS-
enabled devices. For example, most of the recent smart-phones typically
have such GPS technology embedded inside them. Some examples of
such mobile sensor devices may be found in [117, 100].
Sensors typically collect large amounts of data, which must be con-
tinuously stored and processed. Furthermore, since the number of users
in a social network can be very large, this leads to natural scalability
challenges for the storage and processing of the underlying streams. For
example, many naive solutions such as the centralized storage and pro-
cessing of the raw streams are not very practical, because of the large
number of streams which are continuously received. In order to deal
with this issue, a number of recent hardware and software advances
have turned out to be very useful.
Development of Miniaturized Sensor Technology:
The development
of miniaturized (wearable) sensors and batteries have allowed their
use and deployment in a number of different social settings. For
example, the development of miniaturized sensors, which can be
embedded within individual attire can be helpful in a wide vari-
