CollaborateCom Runner Up Paper Award for Hung Nguyen and team

Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Saket Sathe and Duong Chi Thang won the Runner Up Paper Award at the CollaborateCom 2014 conference. The title of the publication is “Towards Enabling Probabilistic Databases for Participatory Sensing”.

CollaborateCom is an international conference on collaborative computing whose main fields are networking, technology and systems, and applications.

Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung is a Doctoral Assistant at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory headed by Professor Karl Aberer. Saket Sathe has worked at IBM Research Australia as a full-time researcher since 2013. At EPFL he was associated with the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory. Duong Chi Thang is doing his MSc thesis at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory.

Abstract: Participatory sensing has emerged as a new data collection paradigm, in which humans use their own devices (cell phone accelerometers, cameras, etc.) as sensors. This paradigm makes it possible to collect a huge amount of data from the crowd for world-wide applications, without having to buy dedicated sensors. Despite this benefit, the data collected from human sensors are inherently uncertain due to the fact that there is no quality guarantee from participants. Moreover, participatory sensing data are time series that not only exhibit highly irregular dependencies on time, but also vary from sensor to sensor. To overcome these issues, we study in this paper the problem of creating probabilistic data from given (uncertain) time series collected by participatory sensors. We approach the problem in two steps. In the first step, we generate probabilistic times series from raw time series using a dynamical model from the time series literature. In the second step, we combine probabilistic time series from multiple sensors based on the mutual relationship between the reliability of the sensors and the quality of their data. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on both real data and synthetic data.

Additional information: CollaborateCom 2014 conference http://collaboratecom.org/2014/show/home