ConferenceSense: Monitoring of public events using phone sensors

We explore the use of a participatory sensing paradigm, where data generated from individual smartphones is used to extract and understand collective properties of temporary public gatherings and events (e.g., concerts & conferences). We focus on the use of this paradigm at a technical conference, and describe the design, implementation and deployment of ConferenceSense, an application that uses multiple sensor and human-generated inputs from attendees' smartphones to infer context, such as the start time of a session or the degree of interaction during a tea break. Based on data collected from multiple attendees at a 3-day conference, we explore how ConferenceSense can be used for monitoring and collecting event statistics, and describe challenges and open questions. Copyright © 2013 ACM.