EveryAware – Enhanced environmental awareness through social information technologies

EveryAware is a three-year research project, funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The project’s focus is on the development of Citizen Science techniques to allow people to find out about their local environmental conditions, and then to see if the provision of this information leads to behaviour change.

The abstract of the project highlights the core topics that will be covered:

‘The enforcement of novel policies may be triggered by a grassroots approach, with a key contribution from information and communication technology (ICT). Current low-cost sensing technologies allow the citizens to directly assess the state of the environment; social networking tools allow effective data and opinion collection and real-time information-spreading processes. Moreover theoretical and modelling tools developed by physicists, computer scientists and sociologists allow citizens to analyse, interpret and visualise complex data sets.

‘The proposed project intends to integrate all crucial phases (environmental monitoring, awareness enhancement, behavioural change) in the management of the environment in a unified framework, by creating a new technological platform combining sensing technologies, networking applications and data-processing
tools; the Internet and the existing mobile communication networks will provide the infrastructure hosting this platform, allowing its replication in different times and places. Case studies concerning different numbers of participants will test the scalability of the platform, aiming to involve as many citizens as possible thanks to
low cost and high usability. The integration of participatory sensing with the monitoring of subjective opinions is novel and crucial, as it exposes the mechanisms by which the local perception of an environmental issue, corroborated by quantitative data, evolves into socially-shared opinions, and how the latter, eventually, drives behavioural changes. Enabling this level of transparency critically allows an effective communication of desirable environmental strategies to the general public and to institutional agencies.’

The project will be coordinated by Fondazione ISI (Institute for Scientific Interchange) and the Physics department at Sapienza Università di Roma. Other participants include the L3S Research Center at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität, Hannover, and finally the Environmental Risk and Health unit at the Flemish Institute of Technological Research (VITO).

At UCL, I will run the project together with Dr Claire Ellul. We will focus on Citizen Science, the interaction with mobile phones for data collection and understanding behaviour change. We are looking for a PhD student to work on this project so, if this type of activity is of interest, get it touch.