  This vision paper presents the case for MUSIC, a programmable framework for
building distributed mobile IoT applications for urban sensing. The Mobile
Urban Sensing, Inference and Control (MUSIC) framework is contextualized for
scenarios where a distributed collection of static or mobile sensors
collectively achieve an urban sensing task. The MUSIC platform is designed for
urban-centric sensing applications such as location sensing on mobile phones
for road traffic monitoring, air quality sensing and urban quality monitoring
using remote cameras. This programmable system, at a high level, consists of
several small sensors placed throughout a city on mobile vehicles and a
centralized controller that makes decisions on sensing in order to achieve
certain well-defined objectives such as improving spatial coverage of sensing
and detection of hotspots. The system is programmable in that our framework
allows one to create custom smart systems by writing custom control logic for
sensing. Our contributions are two-fold -- a backend software stack to enable
centralized control of distributed devices and programmability, and algorithms
for intelligent control in the presence of practical power and network
constraints. We briefly present three different urban sensing applications
built on top of the MUSIC stack.
