Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. UbiComp 2008, Sep 21-24, Seoul, South Korea. Workshops Proceedings. Copyright held by the authors. Fresh: Cell-ID based Mobile Forum for Community Environmental Awareness ABSTRACT This paper describes our mobile framework Fresh which engages the public in location sensitive experiences and in municipal monitoring of their environment, available both on users’ mobile phones, and online. This mobile forum is based on Cell-ID positioning and GPRS communications. It stores and receives information from a remote server which analyses and processes the scientific data received from a scalable mobile sensing framework called MobSens and makes it available to local communities through Fresh. Author Keywords Mobile sensing, environmental monitoring, pervasive computing, location based applications, Urban computing, Social Network. INTRODUCTION Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighbourhoods, and the wireless capability of these phones will allow us to search, publish or share environmental data easily and immediately. People will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their environments [2][3][4]. They will be able to cross-reference publicly available spatially and temporally data - traffic, weather, air quality, -within their vicinity and feel rhythms of their community. In this paper we describe our work in developing a mobile based social network called Fresh which utilise mobile and sensor networks power for the benefit of the environment. Fresh Fresh is a Mobile interface that utilizes GPRS networking and positioning using the cell-IDs from peoples’ phones to allow people to discuss issues related to their local environment. This mobile utility (forum) will encourage users to interact at different locations and times to build a picture of their area and to reduce the carbon footprint in their environment by getting some advises from more experienced users. This mobile forum can quickly help users to discover whether anyone within the surrounding area is interested in environmental issues. In addition, users will be able to access environmental data such as pollution, noise, weather Using prompts to trigger information from users, the interface is a mobile phone tool to engage and encourage participation over time from multiple locations (Figure 1). and traffic information which are generated by a real-time and scalable mobile sensing system [2]. MobSens system is being developed by MESSAGE project [1] which enables individuals to monitor their local environment and their private spaces (e.g. activities and health) by using mobile phones in their day to day life. The MobSens is a combination of software components that facilitates the phone’s internal sensing devices (e.g. Microphone and camera) and external wireless sensors (e.g. data loggers and GPS receivers) for data collection. It also adds a new dimension of spatial localization to the data collection process and provides the user with both textual and spatial cartographic displays. While collecting the data, individuals can interactively add annotations and photos which are automatically transferred to a remote server (over GPRS connection). This makes it easy to visualize the data, photos and annotations on a spatial and temporal visualization tool and web interface. Fresh User Interface In Fresh, initially the world is empty but as the interaction is started the phone cell-ids fill with questions and answers which are asked by users who are trying to make their way across the city. Users can search their current location for any information about their local environment such as pollution level and weather information. Also they can look at a tagged questions and answers related to this location. They can choose to answer the question with a short text response. If they don’t find what they are looking for they could start a new discussion by dropping a question for others to answer. Finally, the on-line website allows users to look up information about any specific area they have been to. They Eiman Kanjo University of Cambridge Computer Labratory Cambridge CB3 0FD ek315@cam.ac.uk 00441223 765292 Peter Landshoff University of Cambridge CMS, Wilberforce Road Cambridge CB3 0WA pvl@damtp.cam.ac.uk