Social Sensing in IoT Applications: A Review

The proliferation of the Internet and mobile devices has led to users increasingly communicating with each other and expressing themselves on a variety of digital channels. Social sensing refers to the collection, processing and analyses of data from such social media and Internet communications. This new form of sensing modality gives insights into user interactions, and thus can play a central role in the Internet-of-Things (IoT). In this review, we first present a range of IoT applications enabled by social data. We then identify core social sensing techniques and inherent challenges. A specific case study of social sensing driven connected landmark lighting is provided to showcase how social sensing techniques can be used to realize an IoT application in practice. We conclude by laying out new directions in social sensing to address challenges like diverse and fast-changing nature of social data, pernicious influencing and data privacy.