Evaluating citizen sensing applications: how simulation of human mobility can contribute to the search of missing children

By the first decade of the century, the developments in mobile computing, including GPS receivers and cameras, have sparked the participation of citizens in solving real-life problems. Humans can move around, observe, and process the captured information based on their intellect. Therefore, citizen sensing applications that use mobile technology to harness the collective intelligence of citizens provide enhanced situational awareness that no machine has been able to offer. However, such applications intrinsically depend each on the engagement of at least a minimum number of citizens subject to their function, a threshold which cannot be easily calculated. This work presents an approach for meeting this challenge using a reconfigurable simulation environment. We focus on the problem of missing children and the engagement of mobile users for their investigation. The goal is to use this simulation environment as an evaluation tool on the effectiveness of such applications depending on their users.