Harnessing the crowds for smart city sensing

In this work we discuss the challenge of harnessing the crowd for smart city sensing. Within a city's context, such reports by citizen or city visitor eye witnesses may provide important information to city officials, additionally to more traditional data gathered by other means (e.g., through the city's control center, emergency services, sensors spread across the city, etc). We present an high-level overview of a novel crowd sensing system that we develop in IBM for the smart cities domain. As a proof of concept, we present some preliminary results using public safety as our example usecase. Copyright 2012 ACM.