Sasu Tarkoma is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and Head of the Department of Computer Science. He is also Director of the Helsinki Center for Data Science (HiDATA) and affiliated with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. He is Fellow of IET and EAI. He has authored 4 textbooks and has published over 200 scientific articles. He has ten granted US Patents. His research has received a number of Best Paper awards and mentions, for example at IEEE PerCom, ACM CCR, and ACM OSR. As an example flagship research project, he is leading the MegaSense project, which aims at deploying a wide array of urban air-monitoring stations and employing the data within prediction models.
MegaSense: Environmental Sensing in Megacities
This talk gives an overview of the MegaSense research program that is a collaboration between Computer Science, Atmospheric Sciences and Geosciences at the University of Helsinki. The research program designs and deploys an environmental monitoring system for realizing low-cost, near real-time and high resolution spatio-temporal air pollution maps of urban areas. MegaSense involves a novel hierarchy of multi-vendor distributed air quality sensors, in which more accurate sensors calibrate lower cost sensors. Current low-cost air quality sensors suffer from measurement drift and they have low accuracy. We address this significant open problem for dense urban areas by developing a calibration scheme based on machine learning that detects and automatically corrects drift. MegaSense integrates with the 5G cellular network and leverages mobile edge computing for sensor management and distributed pollution map creation.