Sara Hachem
Inria@SiliconValley Post-Doc
The Urban Civics Project is part of the CityLab@Inria collaboration with University of California Berkeley towards establishing ICT solutions for smart cities, with the main focus being on engaging citizens towards environmental sustainability and data democratization.
To support the research & development of the Urban Civics project, an Inria@SiliconValley postdoctoral research fellowship was awarded to Sara Hachem, a young researcher who joined the Inria MiMove team in 2010 as a Ph.D. student. Sara’s Ph.D. research led to the conception and implementation of probabilistic discovery protocols for mobile devices in the large scale Internet of Things. Sara’s expertise in large scale mobile sensing allowed her to contribute to the design of the Urban Civics middleware along with the implementation of SoundCity, a use-case specific application that builds on the middleware to monitor noise pollution and its repercussions on citizens’ health.
The Urban Civics Project
How does our urban environment influence our wellbeing? How can we leverage the plethora of available data sources to acquire information on urban pollution? How to integrate various qualitative and quantitative data to produce valuable and openly accessible information on pollution and wellbeing? How to motivate citizens to partake in the sensing process? All these questions are the basis of the Urban Civics research agenda, which builds on the expertise of different research teams in various domains.
Urban Civics aims at providing an IoT middleware solution that enables urban data democratization in the context of smart cities. Urban data is provided by several sources including not only static, mobile and bio-sensors but also citizens themselves. Involving citizens in the sensing process allows them to share their perception of urban pollution with each other and with civic authorities, thus motivating a better informed policy making process while simultaneously providing citizens with insights on the effects of pollution on their health. The project leverages expertise in large scale participatory and opportunistic sensing, crowd sourcing, data assimilation and health-related expertise.
Visit the UrbanCivics site at urbancivics.com
