“San Diego County has 3.1 million residents, 4,000 square miles, and only five official EPA air quality monitors. We know about the air quality in those exact spots but we know much less about the air quality in other places. Our goal is to give San Diegans up-to-the-minute environmental information about where they live, work and play—information that will empower anyone in the community to make healthier choices,” said William Griswold, the principal investigator on the grant and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
So here is the deal: everyone has cell phones. What if those phones could be used to transmit environmental information collected by tiny, inexpensive sensors hanging from your backpack or board shorts...transmit that info to centralized computers that analyze it and send insights back to regular folks in real time?
That's the plan that computer scientists are putting into action now that they have a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Photo caption:
The CitiSense leadership team (l-r) includes computer science professor William Griswold, computer science professor Ingolf Krueger, School of Medicine/Calit2 professor Kevin Patrick, computer science professor Tajana Simunic Rosing, and computer science professor Hovav Shacham. (Not pictured: computer science professor Sanjoy Dasgupta).
