Spatial Crowdsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities

Lei Chen, Cyrus Shahabi
2016 IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin  
As one of the successful forms of using Wisdom of Crowd, crowdsourcing, has been widely used for many human intrinsic tasks, such as image labeling, natural language understanding, market predication and opinion mining. Meanwhile, with advances in pervasive technology, mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, and PDA, have become extremely popular. These mobile devices can work as sensors to collect various types of data, such as pictures, videos, audios and texts. Therefore, in
more » ... cing, a requester can unitize power of mobile devices and their location information to ask for data related a specific location, subsequently, the mobile users who would like to perform the task will travel to the target location and collect the data (videos, audios, or pictures), which is then sent to the requester. This type of crowdsourcing is called spatial crowdsourcing. Due to the pervasiveness of mobile devices and their superb functionality, spatial crowdsourcing is gaining more attention than general crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Turk(http://www.mturk.com) and Crowdflower (http://crowdflower.com/). However, to develop a spatial crowdsourcing platform, effective and efficient solutions for motivating workers, mining workers' profiles, assigning tasks, aggregating results and controlling data quality must be developed. Therefore, in this paper, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities related to these key techniques, including 1) effective incentive mechanisms to encourage mobile device users to participate in crowdsourcing tasks; 2) automatic user profile mining methods; 3) optimal task assignment solutions; 4) novel answer aggregation models; 5) intelligent data quality control mechanisms. Introduction Recent advances in Internet and pervasive computing technology make tasks such as image tagging, language translation, and speech recognition easier to achieve by humans than by machines. Crowdsourcing, as one of the successful forms of utilizing human intelligences, has become quite popular recently. Basically, there are three components in crowdsourcing, a requester, an open call platform and workers. The requester will submit his/her tasks through the open calls and workers who are ready are assigned to perform the task. The
dblp:journals/debu/0002S16 fatcat:fb4s2vddlrf4hgazjsmqglut44