Urban sensing: Out of the woods

Urban sensing is a shift of embedded networked sensing from the laboratories to the environment to anticipate new forms of science built from large-scale citizen-initiated data collection. The observation and surveillance alters human behavior and it is found that when data collection is embedded among the setting, a cycle of interactivity is launched in which observation changes behavior. Various cities, public institutions, and designers are collaborating in urban-sensing projects, creating dynamic events that engage the citizenry. Increased civic engagement include reviews of products, tagging of data, comments on blogs, uploading of photographs, and other whether natural disasters or armed invasions. Urban sensing recognize not only the cognitive limitations in the data collection but also data privacy preferences.