Founded in 1966

Data Management in the CarTel Mobile Sensor Network

Sam Madden

Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

Monday, October 20, 2008
4:30pm - 5:30pm - SENSQ 5317

Refreshments/meet the speaker at 4:00pm

Hosted by Alexandros Labrinidis 

Abstract

CarTel is a software and hardware platform for opportunistic sensing using moving vehicles that has been under development since 2005. Data is captured from GPS, Wi-Fi, and OBD-II interfaces and stored in a local database on each car. This stored data is transferred opportunistically, via available Wi-Fi networks, cellular modems, or by "muling" data on a user's cell phone or USB key, to a central "portal", where users can browse and visualize it. To allow non- expert users to specify what data they would like to collect from remote vehicles, CarTel includes a simple database-like interface for programming and configuration.

In this talk, we will discuss recent development in the CarTel system, focusing on applications of the technology to traffic, road surface quality mapping, and personal commute management, including several interfaces which provides a map-based interface for browsing thousands of hours of driving data collected from a fleet of 27 taxicabs that have been running the software for the past year. I will also discuss some of the database storage and querying challenges that are presented by the scale and noisiness of the data collected from CarTel.

Biography of Speaker

Samuel Madden is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests include databases, sensor networks, and mobile computing. Research projects include the C-Store column-oriented database system, and the CarTel mobile sensor network system. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003 where he worked on the TinyDB system for data collection from sensor networks. Madden was named one of Technology Review's Top 35 Under 35 in 2005, and is the recipient of several awards, including an NSF CAREER Award in 2004, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2007, best paper awards in VLDB 2004 and 2007, and a best paper award in MobiCom 2006.

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