ABSTRACT: The Singapore University of Technology and Design facilitated an ambitious large-scale science experiment in September and November 2015 which saw over 43,000 students carrying sensors designed to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, light, noise, IR temperature, motion, among other physical parameters in a project supported by the National Research Foundation and carried out with partners from the Ministry of Education and the Singapore Science Center. Prof. Erik Wilhelm, Prof. Nils Tippenhauer, and a large team of co-investigators designed the sensors to be able to localize themselves in their environments using a radio-map of Singapore, and to be able to identify which transportation mode was being used during the participant’s daily travels. This talk will introduce the sensor, data storage, and analytics infrastructure we developed, and highlight its potential application in a variety of contexts. Analysis pertaining to urban transportation systems, built environment characterization, and human activity analysis will be presented, and the main research questions posed by the work will be discussed in depth. The National Science Experiment aims to educate students about the powers of large scale statistics but to also serve as a test bed to explore how issues of privacy, data ownership, and personal analytics can be most cautiously leveraged for the betterment of society in this era of increasing connectivity. Finally, a novel method of validating transportation mode and identifying CO2 from wearable sensors will be presented and discussed. This talk should be of interest for a broad audience, the results and analysis approaches will be presented at an interdisciplinary level.
Bio-Sketch: Erik Wilhelm is an assistant professor in the Engineering Product Development Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. His BASc and MASc in Chemical Engineering were earned from the University of Waterloo in 2005 and 2007 respectively. He earned his PhD from the ETH-Zurich while studying multi-criteria vehicle design, data analytics, and control optimization. While in Zürich, Dr. Wilhelm co-founded a start-up in the area of vehicle telematics for reducing on-road energy use. His post-doctoral research was performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Field Intelligence Lab.