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by eurleif
327 days ago
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Is there a feasible way to turn noisy cell phone temperature data into reliable weather data? Cell phones can be indoors; they can be in someone's pocket next to their body heat; they can be in direct sunlight; and they can generate a lot of heat themselves under load. And it's not just outlier phones that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature; it's probably the majority of phones at any given time. |
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But I barely understand how shit works when you operate at Google scale.
I wonder how many "Android-ish" devices like maybe in car entertainment systems are out there and reporting all their telemetry data back to Google? I wonder how much "Android" is in vehicles with AndroidAuto, and whether that hardware typically has temperature and pressure sensors like phones do?
If I had, say, a billion cars sending me data that includes temp, location, and possibly some vehicle specific CANBUS type data - I'd guess there could possibly be a signal in there that could reliably report temps and pressures at locations, based on heuristics that identify cars parked outdoors.
Same with phones. At the scale of "every single Android phone on the planet", the left over after "the majority of phone that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature" still leaves a huge number of devices. I suspect even something stupidly simple like "What's the p99 low temperature of all the Android temp reports in a suburb?" might be a really good indicator, when "all the Android phones in a suburb" might be 10,000 devices or more?