Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness

This book introduces and reviews recent advances inthe field in a comprehensive and non-technical way by focusing on the potentialof emerging citizen-science and social-computation frameworks, coupled with thelatest theoretical and modeling tools developed by physicists, mathematicians,computer and social scientists to analyse, interpret and visualize complex datasets.

There is overwhelming evidence that the currentorganisation of our economies and societies is seriously damaging biologicalecosystems and human living conditions in the short term, with potentiallycatastrophic effects in the long term. The need to re-organise the dailyactivities with the greatest impact – energy consumption, transport, housing –towards a more efficient and sustainable development model has recently beenraised in the public debate on several global, environmental issues. Above all,this requires the mismatch between global, societal and individual needs to beaddressed. Recent advancesin Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)can trigger important transitions at the individual and collective level toachieve this aim.

Based on the findings of the collaborative researchnetwork EveryAware the following developments among the emerging ICTtechnologies are discussed in depth in this volume:

• Participatory sensing – where ICT development ispushed to the level where it can supportinformed action at the hyperlocal scale, providing capabilities forenvironmental monitoring, data aggregation and mining, as well as informationpresentation and sharing.

• Web gaming, social computing and internet-mediatedcollaboration – where the Web will continue to acquire the status of aninfrastructure for social computing, allowing users’ cognitive abilities to becoordinated in online communities, and steering the collective action towardspredefined goals.

• Collective awareness and decision-making – where theaccess to both personal and community data, collected by users, processed withsuitable analysis tools, and re-presented in an appropriate format by usablecommunication interfaces leads to a bottom-up development of collective socialstrategies.