Research

We're always up for a good experiment. Here are some academic and/or open-source projects we've worked on.
GarbageWatch is a participatory sensing initiative which aims to increase recycling on the UCLA campus. Armed with mobile phones, students photograph the contents of trash cans on their daily walking routes. The geo-tagged images are used to calculate the best locations for deploying recycling bins. In addition, the system identifies the best users by analyzing participation and mobility patterns. GarbageWatch is part of Sasank's thesis research at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).
Biketastic is a community-driven project for identifying and sharing the best routes for bike travel. First a mobile phone app automatically logs sensor data to infer location, noise level, and road roughness. Then the collected data is analyzed to derive route characteristics such as exposure to traffic, hilliness, and stopping frequency. Biketastic is currently in beta and was developed by several members of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), including Sasank.
Lifetrak is a next generation context-aware portable music player. It collects information about the user's environment in real-time and automatically selects music the user wants to hear. Our prototype was developed for the Nokia 770, the best-suited platform available at the time. We presented our work at the 1st ACM workshop on Human-Centered Multimedia. Check out our paper.