Program, Best Papers, Keynotes > Invited Speakers

Valérie Issarny, INRIA Senior Research Scientist, France

Title of the Keynote: Monitoring Urban Pollution using Mobile Crowd Sensing: The SoundCity Use Case

Abstract: Noise pollution, which lowers quality of life and harms health, is a serious environmental challenge in almost every major city. In Paris, the urban ecology agency and the Bruitparif association currently rely on monitoring stations and computer simulations to understand noise exposure of citizens. While these provide valuable data toward understanding urban noise pollution, we believe that mobile crowdsensing may significantly contribute to dealing with pollution awareness, both individually and collectively.
In that direction, we have been developing the SoundCity app and the supporting UrbanCivics middleware solution. SoundCity captures noise levels from the microphones built into today’s smartphones, with the dual objective of assessing the degree of exposure of the individual user and building an overall map of noise pollution in the city. Thus, individually, users see their exposure visualized over time and are able to compare the exposure with the levels recommended to protect health. Collectively, crowdsensed data are aggregated with other relevant data sources to produce noise pollution maps.
In this talk, I will present the design of SoundCity and supporting middleware together with lessons learnt since the public launch of SoundCity with the city of Paris in July 2015. I will further highlight the challenges posed to a middleware solution leveraging mobile crowd-sensing toward better urban pollution monitoring.

Bio: Dr. Valérie Issarny (https://mimove.inria.fr/members/valerie-issarny/) holds a "Directrice de recherche" position at Inria (http://www.inria.fr), the French institute for research in Information and Communication Science and Technologies, where she led the ARLES research team until 2013, investigating distributed software systems leveraging wirelessly networked devices, with a special emphasis on service-oriented computing. Since summer 2013, she is the scientific coordinator of the Inria@SiliconValley program (https://project.inria.fr/siliconvalley/) promoting and fostering collaboration between Inria and California universities. She is also coordinating the Inria CityLab program (https://citylab.inria.fr/) dedicated to smart cities and promoting citizen engagement; the program is developed in collaboration with CITRIS at University of California Berkeley and targets urban-scale experiment in Paris and California cities. Ongoing projects include UrbanCivics (http://urbancivics.com) on urban pollution monitoring through participatory sensing and crowd sourcing, and AppCivist (https://citylab.inria.fr/appcivist-social-apps/) on a middleware platform for democratic assembly and collective action.

Professor Marie-Pierre Gleizes, University of Toulouse, France

Title of the Keynote: neOCampus, Campus of the Future