Smarter Communities: Community-Based Sense and Respond Systems

by K. Mani Chandy, CalTech

A smart system is a system that senses what is going on in its environment and responds effectively. A community-based sense and response (CBSR) system is a system that enables the community as a whole to sense and respond smarter. CBSR systems depend on resources and time volunteered by ordinary people who provide sensors, responders and computational and communication resources.

There are several examples of CBSR systems and there will be many more in the next decade. Information aggregated from mobile phones equipped with global positioning system capability help monitor road traffic congestion in projects at the University of California at Berkeley, Microsoft Research, and Air Sage Inc. in Atlanta. A Purdue University project is fusing information from mobile phones provided with radiation-detection sensors to locate and identify harmful radiation sources. Inexpensive accelerometers connected to computers in people’s homes are being integrated to form earthquake warning systems in the Quake-Catcher Network at Stanford and a shakemap generation network at the California Institute of Technology.  pdf article