We believe that iCampus can provide a new paradigm for people to share and access information on the web. With iCampus, users can share their data about USC with other members of the USC community and also effectively navigate the existing data based on the spatial-temporal-social associations of the data objects. iCampus will include various types of datasets about USC, including publicly available data (e.g., from Flickr™, YouTube™, Twitter™), participatory data shared by users (e.g., pictures, videos, location-data), USC's proprietary data (e.g., events, alerts, DPS announcements), and IMSC's proprietary data (e.g., 3D Models, CCTV, traffic). iCampus can be expected to be the portal for USC community in the future with great potential to be adopted by other campuses as well as small cities.

Geospatial data access tools (e.g., Google mashups) and social networking tools (e.g., Facebook™) have been two families of popular online tools. Even now, each family follows its own evolutionary path, with the former enabling spatial and temporal navigation of data objects (i.e., using where and when to access what), while the latter focuses on man-to-man communication (i.e., who). Without a doubt, each has been extremely successful in providing highly useful tools people are using everyday. We believe that time is ripe for a merry marriage between the two families to bear what we dub Geosocial portal, where users share data and access data objects based on their whereabouts, when-abouts and who-abouts!

iCampus is envisioned to blend the real-world with the virtual-world. People are already witnessing this through the excitements over location-based-services, social-networks, participatory-sensing (crowd sourcing) and online maps, i.e., a new generation of geo-socio-temporal computing paradigm, "Geo-Immersion". This is when information-access will become a supporting tool for people's everyday life, work, study, entertainment, etc. This new paradigm uses the four dimensions of "what, when, where and who" to enable people naturally operate in this hybrid virtual-real world. In other words, this paradigm enables people (who) to "connect" across time (when) and space (where) with purpose (what).

iCampus can be reached here. Note that it is curreltly password protected and the access will be granted to any interested users upon requests. This is a demonstration version of iCampus while being developed and it can be changed and updated at any time.

iCampus also supports access from various mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, and Android Phones. An example of implemented iPad applications can be found at the following video:

Subprojects

Year 2011 - 2012

Energy Literacy Platform for USC Campus

• Lead by Dr. Burcin Becerik Gerber (Civil and Environmental Eng.)
• Develop a BMS-occupant commuication module which provides building ambient factor feedback to participants for reducing energy consumption

Year 2010 - 2011

Targeted Trojan Alerts

• Lead by Dr. Daniel W. Goldberg (Spatial Sciences Institute)
• Provide customized alert system using user location information 

Sensing Occupancy and Location

• Lead by Dr. Bhaskar Krishnamachari (Electrical Eng.)
• Develop an occupancy sensing system for buildings and rooms

AmbientFactors for iCampus

• Lead by Dr. Burcin Becerik Gerber (Civil and Environmental Eng.)
• Record, organize, and visualize the spatiotemporal indoor ambient information voluntarily provided by the USC campus users

Related Educational Activities

Year 2010 - 2011

Android Projects under CSCI587: Geospatial Information Managements

External Collaboration

Year 2010 - 2012

GeoVid

• Team: Dr. Roger Zimmermann (National University of Singapore), Dr. Seon Ho Kim (IMSC), Dr. Sakire Arslan Ay (National University of Singapore)
• The GeoVid project explores the concept of sensor-rich video tagging. Specifically, recorded videos are tagged with a continuous stream of extended geographic properties that relate to the camera scenes. This meta-data is then utilized for storing, indexing and searching large collections of community-generated videos. By considering video related meta-information, more relevant and precisely delimited search results can be returned.
• Demo video:
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