(Via boingboing):

R.J. Honicky, a computer science graduate student at UC Berkeley, proposes smart mobs of smart phones to monitor environmental problems.

Right now, there are hundreds of millions of cell phones in use around the world. According to UC Berkeley computer science graduate student R.J. Honicky, the ubiquity of those devices could be leveraged to help reduce pollution, fight disease, and tackle other societal scale problems with no additional effort on the part of the person carrying the phone. The key is outfitting newly manufactured cell phones with inexpensive environmental sensors.

“By their sheer numbers, cell phones provide an opportunity to gather geospatial data with much higher granularity and more penetration than previously possible,” says Honicky, who is developing such a system with College of Engineering dean Richard Newton. “This is especially true in the developing world, where there’s often a lack of funds for scientific research.”