Seeing Our Signals: Combining location traces and web-based models for personal discovery

Seeing Our Signals: Combining location traces and web-based models for personal discovery E. Agapie, G. Chen, D. Houston, E. Howard, J. Kim, M. Y. Mun, A. Mondschein, S. Reddy, R. Rosario, J. Ryder, A. Steiner, J. Burke, E. Estrin, M. Hansen, M. Rahimi. 1. Introduction: A new mobility application Each of us has a complex and reciprocal relationship with our environment. Based on limited knowledge of this interwoven set of influences and consequences, we constantly make choices: where to live, how to go to work, what brands to buy, what to do with our leisure time. These choices evolve into patterns, and these patterns become driving functions of our relationship with the world around us. With increasing ease, devices we carry can sense, process, and transmit data on these patterns for our own use or to share, carefully, with others. In particular, here we will focus on location time series, gathered from GPS-enabled personal mobile devices. From this capacity emerges a new class of hybrid mobile-web applications that, first, enable personal exploration of our own patterns and, second, use the same data to index our life into other available datasets about the world around us. Such applications, revealing the previously unobservable about our own lives, offer an opportunity to employ mobile technology to illuminate the ramifications of our choices on others and the effects of the “microenvironments” we move through on us. This paper proposes and demonstrates how easily gathered location time series data can be used as an index into geospatial models to infer personal environmental impact and exposure. It focuses on three areas of interaction between individuals and the environment: transportation mode choice, overall carbon footprint, and opportunities for healthy eating. This class of applications represents a novel use of mobile systems, web-based mapping, and geospatial data and services. They pose interesting technical challenges and require multidisciplinary research. In the spirit of [20] we offer this anecdote: Glancing at her phone, Lori sees that she has only a few minutes left before her meeting. She pays for her coffee, stows a proofread copy of her daughter’s report on a historical article, The Computer for the 21 st Century, in her bag, and dashes out. She texts her daughter that she has some ideas for the end, pulls up a traffic report and, sighing, heads off on surface roads, fashionably late to another hour of Powerpoint. Later on, the pair meet downtown for dinner at they heard about on a food blog and head back home together. Home on a Saturday four days later, they visit their Personal Environmental Impact Report web pages together for fun, comparing results in good-natured banter. Lori tries to use her daughter’s low emissions score from the train trip downtown and constant bike riding as another reason to not help her buy a car, but teenage logic sees it as more of a reason for a hybrid. (That way, when she drives instead of her friends, she’ll reduce their emissions!) As they’re exploring the pages, created dynamically from location data uploaded by their phones, Lori realizes to herself that her surface street route took her right by a school at recess; she decides try a different route and see how her impact score changes next week. She also wonders why they let traffic go so fast there in the first place—if it were a little calmer there might be less drivers tempted to go through there. Looking back to their monthly summaries, the two realize they walk more on the days when they’re together. They decide the report on Mark Weiser’s article should end with that. Effective stewardship of our environment requires an understanding of our complex relationship with it that matures through new knowledge and self-reflection. This is true not just for individuals, but on community and global scales as well. Some of the most persistent challenges attributed to urban living occur through a complex set of person-environment interactions. Researchers in urban planning, public health, environmental science, and other fields have increasingly emphasized the importance of