A Cloud-Based Knowledge Discovery System for Monitoring Fine-Grained Air Quality

Many developing countries are suffering from air pollution recently. Governments have built a few air quality monitoring stations in cities to inform people the concentration of air pollutants. Unfortunately, urban air quality is highly skewed in a city, depending on multiple complex factors, such as the meteorology, traffic volume, and land uses. Building more monitoring stations is very costly in terms of money, land uses, and human resources. As a result, people do not really know the fine-grained air quality of a location without a monitoring station. In this paper, we introduce a cloud-based knowledge discovery system that infers the real-time and fine-grained air quality information throughout a city based on the (historical and real-time) air quality data reported by existing monitor stations and a variety of data sources observed in the city, such as meteorology, traffic flow, human mobility, structure of road networks, and point of interests (POIs). The system also provides a mobile client, with which a user can monitor the air quality of multiple locations in a city (e.g. the current location, home and work places), and a web service that allows other applications to call the air quality of any location. The system has been evaluated based on the real data from 9 cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guanzhou, and Shenzhen, etc. The system is running on Microsoft Azure and the mobile client is publicly available in Window Phone App Store, entitled Urban Air. Our system gives a cost-efficient example for enabling a knowledge discovery prototype involving big data on the cloud.