The operating environment of cellular networks can be in a constant state of change due to variations and evolutions of technology, subscriber load, and physical infrastructure. One cellular operator, which we interviewed, described two key difficulties. Firstly, they are unable to monitor the performance of their network in a scalable and fine-grained manner. Secondly, they find difficulty in monitoring the service quality experienced by each user equipment (UE). Consequently, they are unable to effectively diagnose performance impairments on a per-UE basis. They currently expend considerable manual efforts to monitor their network through controlled, small-scale drive-testing. If this is not performed satisfactorily, they risk losing subscribers, and also possible penalties from regulators. In this dissertation, we propose Tattle1, a distributed, low-cost participatory sensing framework for the collection and processing of UE measurements. Tattle is designed to solve three problems, namely coverage monitoring (CM), service quality monitoring (QM) and, per-device service quality estimation and classification (QEC). In Tattle, co-located UEs exchange uncertain location information and measurements using local-area broadcasts. This preserves the context of co-location of these measurements. It allows us to develop U-CURE, as well as its delay-adjusted variant, to discard erroneously-localized samples, and reduce localization errors respectively. It allows operators to generate timely, high-resolution and accurate monitoring maps. Operators can then make informed, expedient network management decisions, such as adjusting base-station parameters, to making long-term infrastructure investment. We propose a comprehensive statistical framework that also allows an individual UE to estimate and classify its own network performance. In our approach, each UE monitors its recent measurements, together with those reported by co-located UEs. Then, through our framework, UEs can automatically determine if any observed impairment is endemic amongst other co-located devices. Subscribers that experience isolated impairments can then take limited remedy steps, such as rebooting their devices. We demonstrate Tattle's effectiveness by presenting key results, using up to millions of real-world measurements. These were collected systematically using current generations of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile devices. For CM, we show that in urban built-up areas, GPS locations reported by UEs may have significant uncertainties and can sometimes be several kilometers away from their true locations. We describe how U-CURE can take into account reported location uncertainty and the knowledge of measurement co-location to remove erroneously-localized readings. This allows us to retain measurements with very high location accuracy, and in turn derive accurate, fine-grained coverage information. Operators can then react and respond to specific areas with coverage issues in a timely manner. Using our approach, we showcase high-resolution results of actual coverage conditions in selected areas of Singapore. For QM, we show that localization performance in COTS devices may exhibit non-negligible correlation with network round-trip delay. This can result in localization errors of up to 605.32m per 1,000ms of delay. Naïve approaches that blindly accepts measurements with their reported locations will therefore result in grossly mis-localized data points. This affects the fidelity of any geo-spatial monitoring information derived from these data sets. We demonstrate that using the popular localization approach of combining Global-Positioning System together with Network-Assisted Localization, may result in a median root-mean-square (rms) error increase of over 60%. This is in comparison to simply using the Global-Positioning System on its own. We propose a network-delay-adjusted variant of U-CURE, to cooperatively improve the localization performance of COTS devices. We show improvements of up to 70% in terms of median rms location errors, even while subjected to uncertain real-world network delay conditions, with just 3 participating UEs. This allows us to refine the purported locations of delay measurements, and as a result, derive accurate, fine-grained and actionable cellular quality information. Using this approach, we present accurate cellular network delay maps that are of much higher spatial-resolution, as compared to those naively derived using raw data. For QEC, we report on the characteristics of the delay performance of co-located devices subscribed to 2 particular cellular network operators in Singapore. We describe the results of applying our proposed approach to addressing the QEC problem, on real-world measurements of over 443,500 data points. We illustrate examples where “normal” and “abnormal” performances occur in real networks, and report instances where a device can experience complete outage, while none of its neighbors are affected. We give quantitative results on how well our algorithm can detect an “abnormal” time series, with increasing effectiveness as the number of co-located UEs increases. With just 3 UEs, we are able to achieve a median detection accuracy of just under 70%. With 7 UEs, we can achieve a median detection rate of just under 90%. 1 The meaning of Tattle, as a verb, is to gossip idly. By letting devices communicate their observations with one another, we explore the kinds of insights that can elicited based on this peer-to-peer exchange.

Plants are vital to the health of our biosphere, and effectively sustaining their growth is fundamental to the existence of life on this planet. A critical aspect, which decides the sustainability of plant growth is the quality of soil. All other things being fixed, the quality of soil greatly impacts the plant stress, which in turn impacts overall health. Although plant stress manifests in many ways, one of the clearest indicators are colors of the leaves. In this thesis, we conducted an experimental study in a greenhouse for detecting plant stress caused by nutrient deficienceies in soil using smartphone cameras, coupled with image processing and machine learning algorithms. The greenhouse experiment was conducted by growing two plant species; willows (Salix Pentandra) and poplars (Populus deltoides x nigra, DN34), in two treatments. These treatments included: unamended tailings (collected from a lead mine tailings pond and characterized by nutrient deficiency), and biosolids amended tailings. Biosolids are very rich in nutrients and were added to the tailings in one of the two treatments to supply plants with nutrients. Subsequently, we captured various images of plant leaves grown in both soils. Each image taken was pre-processed via filteration to remove associated noise, and was segmented into pixels to facilitate scalability of analysis. Subsequently, we designed random forests based algorithms to detect the stress of leaves as indicated by their coloring. In a dataset consisting of 34 leaves, our technique yields classifications with a high degree of prediction, recall and F1 score. Our work in this thesis, while restricted to two types of plants and soils, can be generalized. We see applications in the emerging area of urban farming in terms of empowering citizens with tools and technologies for enhancing quality of farming practices.

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Privacy is a crucial aspect of any system involving user-supplied data. There exist multiple approaches to protecting the identity and secrecy of users in data submission systems. In this thesis, I consider the case of privacy-enhancing of data reporting in Participatory Sensing systems. I conducted an extensive literature overview to explore privacy-oriented enhancements to data submission that are applicable in the PS systems. I designed a protocol for proximity-based data aggregation that utilizes Multi-party Secure Computations over Bluetooth Low Energy. Users are divided into groups that perform sub-aggregations and report results to central entities, protecting themselves from honest-but-curious adversary threats. I present a mobile app and web servers for central entities that follow the design of the protocol. I evaluated the achieved effectiveness and discuss the utility and privacy trade-offs. The implementation performs typically for an MPC system with high communication overhead, and is implemented over Bluetooth, with the additional time needed for discovering and connecting devices. The overall performance of the system suggests that deployments targeting 1-second intervals of data submission are feasible. Main use cases are sensitive measurements, such as medical data or highly private user information. / Sekretess är en avgörande aspekt av alla system som involverar data som tillhandahålls av användare. Det finns flera tillvägagångssätt för att skydda användarnas identitet och sekretess i datainlämningssystem. I den här avhandlingen behandlar jag fallet med integritetsförbättrande datarapportering i Participatory Sensing-system. Jag genomförde en omfattande litteraturöversikt för att utforska integritetsorienterade förbättringar av datainlämning som är tillämpliga i PS-systemen. Jag designade ett protokoll för närhetsbaserad dataaggregering som använder flerpartssäkra beräkningar över Bluetooth Low Energy. Användare är indelade i grupper som utför sub-aggregeringar och rapporterar resultat till centrala enheter, och skyddar sig själva från ärliga men nyfikna motståndarhot. Jag presenterar en mobilapp och webbservrar för centrala enheter som följer protokollets design. Jag utvärderade den uppnådda effektiviteten och diskuterade nytta och sekretessavvägningar. Implementeringen fungerar som man kan förvänta sig för ett MPC-system med höga kommunikationskostnader, och implementeras över Bluetooth, med den extra tid som krävs för att upptäcka och ansluta enheter. Systemets övergripande prestanda tyder på att implementeringar som är inriktade på 1-sekunds intervaller för datainlämning är genomförbara. Huvudsakliga användningsfall är känsliga mätningar, såsom medicinska data eller mycket privat användarinformation.

Privacy is a crucial aspect of any system involving user-supplied data. There exist multiple approaches to protecting the identity and secrecy of users in data submission systems. In this thesis, I consider the case of privacy-enhancing of data reporting in Participatory Sensing systems. I conducted an extensive literature overview to explore privacy-oriented enhancements to data submission that are applicable in the PS systems. I designed a protocol for proximity-based data aggregation that utilizes Multi-party Secure Computations over Bluetooth Low Energy. Users are divided into groups that perform sub-aggregations and report results to central entities, protecting themselves from honest-but-curious adversary threats. I present a mobile app and web servers for central entities that follow the design of the protocol. I evaluated the achieved effectiveness and discuss the utility and privacy trade-offs. The implementation performs typically for an MPC system with high communication overhead, and is implemented over Bluetooth, with the additional time needed for discovering and connecting devices. The overall performance of the system suggests that deployments targeting 1-second intervals of data submission are feasible. Main use cases are sensitive measurements, such as medical data or highly private user information. / Sekretess är en avgörande aspekt av alla system som involverar data som tillhandahålls av användare. Det finns flera tillvägagångssätt för att skydda användarnas identitet och sekretess i datainlämningssystem. I den här avhandlingen behandlar jag fallet med integritetsförbättrande datarapportering i Participatory Sensing-system. Jag genomförde en omfattande litteraturöversikt för att utforska integritetsorienterade förbättringar av datainlämning som är tillämpliga i PS-systemen. Jag designade ett protokoll för närhetsbaserad dataaggregering som använder flerpartssäkra beräkningar över Bluetooth Low Energy. Användare är indelade i grupper som utför sub-aggregeringar och rapporterar resultat till centrala enheter, och skyddar sig själva från ärliga men nyfikna motståndarhot. Jag presenterar en mobilapp och webbservrar för centrala enheter som följer protokollets design. Jag utvärderade den uppnådda effektiviteten och diskuterade nytta och sekretessavvägningar. Implementeringen fungerar som man kan förvänta sig för ett MPC-system med höga kommunikationskostnader, och implementeras över Bluetooth, med den extra tid som krävs för att upptäcka och ansluta enheter. Systemets övergripande prestanda tyder på att implementeringar som är inriktade på 1-sekunds intervaller för datainlämning är genomförbara. Huvudsakliga användningsfall är känsliga mätningar, såsom medicinska data eller mycket privat användarinformation.

Despite the significant investments over the last few decades to enhance and improve road infrastructure worldwide, the capacity of road networks has not kept pace with the ever increasing growth in demand. As a result, congestion has become endemic to many highways and city streets. As an alternative to costly and sometimes infeasible construction of new roads, transportation departments are increasingly looking at ways to improve traffic flow over the existing infrastructure. The biggest challenge in accomplishing this goal is the ability to sample traffic data, estimate traffic current state, and forecast its future behavior. In this thesis, we first address the problem of traffic sampling where we propose strategies for frugal sensing where we collect a fraction of the observed traffic information to reduce costs while achieving high accuracy. Next we demonstrate how traffic estimation using deterministic traffic models can be improved using proposed data reconstruction techniques. Finally, we propose how mixture of experts algorithm which consists of two regime-specific linear predictors and a decision tree gating function can improve short-term and long-term traffic forecasting. As mobile devices become more pervasive, participatory sensing is becoming an attractive way of collecting large quantities of valuable location-based data. An important participatory sensing application is traffic monitoring, where GPS-enabled smartphones can provide invaluable information about traffic conditions. We propose a strategy for frugal sensing in which the participants send only a fraction of the observed traffic information to reduce costs while achieving high accuracy. The strategy is based on autonomous sensing, in which participants make decisions to send traffic information without guidance from the central server, thus reducing the communication overhead and improving privacy. To provide accurate and computationally efficient estimation of the current traffic, we propose to use a budgeted version of the Gaussian Process model on the server side. The experiments on real-life traffic data sets indicate that the proposed approach can use up to two orders of magnitude less samples than a baseline approach with only a negligible loss in accuracy. The estimation of the state of traffic provides a detailed picture of the conditions of a traffic network based on limited traffic measurements and, as such, plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems. Most often, traffic measurements are aggregated over multiple time steps, and this procedure raises the question of how to best use this information for state estimation. Reconstructing the high-resolution measurements from the aggregated ones and using them to correct the state estimates at every time step are proposed. Several reconstruction techniques from signal processing, including kernel regression and a reconstruction approach based on convex optimization, were considered. Experimental results show that signal reconstruction leads to more accurate traffic state estimation as compared with the standard approach for dealing with aggregated measurements. Accurate traffic speed forecasting can help in trip planning by allowing travelers to avoid congested routes, either by choosing alternative routes or by changing the departure time. An important feature of traffic is that it consists of free flow and congested regimes, which have significantly different properties. Training a single traffic speed predictor for both regimes typically results in suboptimal accuracy. To address this problem, a mixture of experts algorithm which consists of two regime-specific linear predictors and a decision tree gating function was developed. Experimental results showed that mixture of experts approach outperforms several popular benchmark approaches. / Computer and Information Science

Participatory sensing frameworks use humans and their computing devices as a large mobile sensing network. Dramatic accessibility and affordability have turned mobile devices (smartphone and tablet computers) into the most popular computational machines in the world, exceeding laptops. By the end of 2013, more than 1.5 billion people on earth will have a smartphone. Increased coverage and higher speeds of cellular networks have given these devices the power to constantly stream large amounts of data. Most mobile devices are equipped with advanced sensors such as GPS, cameras, and microphones. This expansion of smartphone numbers and power has created a sensing system capable of achieving tasks practically impossible for conventional sensing platforms. One of the advantages of participatory sensing platforms is their mobility, since human users are often in motion. This dissertation presents a set of techniques for modeling and predicting user transportation patterns from cell-phone and social media check-ins. To study large-scale transportation patterns, I created a mobile phone app, Kpark, for estimating parking lot occupancy on the UCF campus. Kpark aggregates individual user reports on parking space availability to produce a global picture across all the campus lots using crowdsourcing. An issue with crowdsourcing is the possibility of receiving inaccurate information from users, either through error or malicious motivations. One method of combating this problem is to model the trustworthiness of individual participants to use that information to selectively include or discard data. This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of the performance of different worker quality and data fusion models with plausible simulated user populations, as well as an evaluation of their performance on the real data obtained from a full release of the Kpark app on the UCF Orlando campus. To evaluate individual trust prediction methods, an algorithm selection portfolio was introduced to take advantage of the strengths of each method and maximize the overall prediction performance. Like many other crowdsourced applications, user incentivization is an important aspect of creating a successful crowdsourcing workflow. For this project a form of non-monetized incentivization called gamification was used in order to create competition among users with the aim of increasing the quantity and quality of data submitted to the project. This dissertation reports on the performance of Kpark at predicting parking occupancy, increasing user app usage, and predicting worker quality.

This thesis deals with contemporary approaches that provide higher protection of privacy of users. It focuses mainly on a group signature. In the practical part of this thesis I designed and implemented PS that is enable to gather information with the help of signal of a mobile device. The application was designed in accordance with fundamental cryptographic requirements such as the authenticity and the integrity of transmitted data. The anonymity of users is guaranteed through an application layer (the group signature) as well as through a network layer (Tor).

Aujourd'hui, les progrès dans le développement d'appareils mobiles et des capteurs embarqués ont permis un essor sans précédent de services à l'utilisateur. Dans le même temps, la plupart des appareils mobiles génèrent, enregistrent et de communiquent une grande quantité de données personnelles de manière continue. La gestion sécurisée des données personnelles dans les appareils mobiles reste un défi aujourd’hui, que ce soit vis-à-vis des contraintes inhérentes à ces appareils, ou par rapport à l’accès et au partage sûrs et sécurisés de ces informations. Cette thèse adresse ces défis et se focalise sur les traces de localisation. En particulier, s’appuyant sur un serveur de données relationnel embarqué dans des appareils mobiles sécurisés, cette thèse offre une extension de ce serveur à la gestion des données spatio-temporelles (types et operateurs). Et surtout, elle propose une méthode d'indexation spatio-temporelle (TRIFL) efficace et adaptée au modèle de stockage en mémoire flash. Par ailleurs, afin de protéger les traces de localisation personnelles de l'utilisateur, une architecture distribuée et un protocole de collecte participative préservant les données de localisation ont été proposés dans PAMPAS. Cette architecture se base sur des dispositifs hautement sécurisés pour le calcul distribué des agrégats spatio-temporels sur les données privées collectées. / Nowadays, the advances in the development of mobile devices, as well as embedded sensors have permitted an unprecedented number of services to the user. At the same time, most mobile devices generate, store and communicate a large amount of personal information continuously. While managing personal information on the mobile devices is still a big challenge, sharing and accessing these information in a safe and secure way is always an open and hot topic. Personal mobile devices may have various form factors such as mobile phones, smart devices, stick computers, secure tokens or etc. It could be used to record, sense, store data of user's context or environment surrounding him. The most common contextual information is user's location. Personal data generated and stored on these devices is valuable for many applications or services to user, but it is sensitive and needs to be protected in order to ensure the individual privacy. In particular, most mobile applications have access to accurate and real-time location information, raising serious privacy concerns for their users.In this dissertation, we dedicate the two parts to manage the location traces, i.e. the spatio-temporal data on mobile devices. In particular, we offer an extension of spatio-temporal data types and operators for embedded environments. These data types reconcile the features of spatio-temporal data with the embedded requirements by offering an optimal data presentation called Spatio-temporal object (STOB) dedicated for embedded devices. More importantly, in order to optimize the query processing, we also propose an efficient indexing technique for spatio-temporal data called TRIFL designed for flash storage. TRIFL stands for TRajectory Index for Flash memory. It exploits unique properties of trajectory insertion, and optimizes the data structure for the behavior of flash and the buffer cache. These ideas allow TRIFL to archive much better performance in both Flash and magnetic storage compared to its competitors.Additionally, we also investigate the protect user's sensitive information in the remaining part of this thesis by offering a privacy-aware protocol for participatory sensing applications called PAMPAS. PAMPAS relies on secure hardware solutions and proposes a user-centric privacy-aware protocol that fully protects personal data while taking advantage of distributed computing. For this to be done, we also propose a partitioning algorithm an aggregate algorithm in PAMPAS. This combination drastically reduces the overall costs making it possible to run the protocol in near real-time at a large scale of participants, without any personal information leakage.

Participatory Sensing Systems (PSS) are a type of Mobile Crowdsensing System where users voluntarily participate in contributing information. Task initiators create tasks, targeting specific data that needs to be gathered by the users’ device sensors. Such systems have been designed with different requirements, such as data trustworthiness, accountability, and incentives, in a secure and private way. However, it is complex to protect user privacy without affecting the performance of the rest of the system. For example, with task assignment, either the user authenticates anonymously, or discloses its sensors for an efficient allocation. If the user identity is hidden from the system, it could receive a task it cannot perform. This thesis aims to design an anonymous authentication model for PSS based on privacy-preserving attribute-based signatures. The proposed solution allows the Participatory Sensing System to enforce sensor requirements for efficient task allocation. In addition to the design, experiments measuring the performance of the operations are included in the thesis, to prove it is suitable for real-world scenarios. / Participatory Sensing Systems (PSS) är en typ av mobilt Crowdsensing-system där användare frivilligt deltar i att bidra med information. Aktivitetsinitiatorer skapar uppgifter, inriktade på specifik data som behöver samlas in av användarnas enhetssensorer. Sådana system har utformats med olika krav, såsom datatillförlitlighet, ansvarighet och incitament, på ett säkert och privat sätt. Det är dock komplicerat att skydda användarnas integritet utan att påverka prestandan för resten av systemet. Till exempel, med uppgiftstilldelning, antingen autentiserar användaren anonymt eller avslöjar sina sensorer för en effektiv tilldelning. Om användaridentiteten är dold från systemet kan den få en uppgift som den inte kan utföra. Denna avhandling syftar till att designa en anonym autentiseringsmodell för PSS baserad på integritetsbevarande attributbaserade signaturer. Den föreslagna lösningen gör det möjligt för Participatory Sensing System att upprätthålla sensorkrav för effektiv uppgiftsallokering. Utöver designen ingår experiment som mäter verksamhetens prestanda i avhandlingen, för att bevisa att den är lämplig för verkliga scenarier.