Abstract:

With over 70% of the world's entire population expected to be living in cities by 2050, supporting citizens' mobility, among other aspects of urban environment is a priority for municipalities worldwide. Thanks to the increased abundance of smart phones (equipped with various types of physical sensors, as well as enabling the users to easily report phenomena), the field of mobile crowdsourcing has emerged recently, and can be leveraged towards providing a more fine-grain and up-to-date view of the city's transportation system.

This talk will introduce the mobile Internet of things as is now enabled thanks to the numerous smart phones present in our cities, and also cover the challenges associated in leveraging them to enable the smart city vision. We will further present the details of the TravelDashboard platform for assisting urban mobility, using which citizens can both report on current metro traffic status, as well as receive latest updates about the state of public transportation in their city, based on a blending of both official and crowd-sourced data.

Bio Animesh Pathak

Dr. Animesh Pathak received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 2008 and is currently “Chargé de recherche” at Inria Paris-Rocquencourt with the ARLES team. His research interests relate to distributed systems, middleware, ubiquitous computing systems, sensor networks, and mobile social networking. He has been involved with several European projects, and is the Inria PI for the EIT ICT Labs 3cixty activity on mobile participatory sensing to improve urban transportation, as well as the "Sarathi" joint team with IIIT-Delhi on personalized urban mobility for dynamic large-scale systems in the Indian context. He also currently leads the work on the Yarta middleware for supporting development of mobile social applications.