1. Allergy Reporter Jeff Boyd Sam Olsen

2. Motivation

3. Related Work Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content Through Mobile Phones and Social Participation o Search a given area Twitter: Small messages, What are you doing now? o What’s it like now?

4. Related Work Pollen.com o Website o Widgets

5. Related Work Official pollen.com iPhone/iPod Touch App Does NOT do automatic location estimation NO social networking aspirations

6. Original Goal Incorporate information from Pollen.com and AirNow.gov into a mobile application to provide air quality information Include a microblog feature in the application, thereby adding a “human sensor” to the reporting, and encouraging social interaction

7. Ideal Architecture

8. Roadblocks AirNow.gov has a private API for accessing Air Quality Index data o We didn’t receive a response when requesting access There are publicly accessible Google Earth.kml files o The files are large, making them impractical to parse on a mobile computer o The location data is too course, only containing select cities

9. Roadblocks cont. Pollen.com provides no API, but...

10. Workaround Pollen.com does provide an interface for looking up pollen count information by zip code No authenticity token means we have a solution: Page Scraping!! Drawbacks o Slow o Unstable, can change at any moment

11. Realized Architecture

12. User Interface

13. Microblog Features Location based on zip, blogs associated with cities Truncate to 70 characters (half a tweet) Communicates with server over HTTP Display most recent first

14. User Interface

16. Testing Questions Efficacy of a mobile pollen reporter o How does a mobile pollen reporter compare to a strictly web-based tool? Other tools? o Can a mobile application be solely relied upon for all allergy/respiratory information? o Who does this application work best for?  How do we improve it for non-target demographics?

17. Testing Questions cont. Social impact of microblog feature o Using humans as sensors  Usefulness compared to mechanical sensors?  Personal motivation to blog? o Are there unintended uses of the feature?

18. Future Work Integrate with AirNow.gov to get AQI information Gain access to Pollen.com API to improve efficiency Gather feedback on usefulness of microblogging. Research what works well and how to improve