Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work. F. Restuccia et al.Not only are today's smartphones ubiquitous devices, they are also equipped with a plethora of embedded multi-modal sensors; integrate wireless communication technologies such as 4G/WiFi Internet connectivity, and possess complex processing capabilities. For example, the cameras on smartphones can be used as video and image sensors [29], the microphone can be used as an acoustic sensor [39,154,206], and the embedded global positioning system (GPS) receiver can be used to gather accurate location information, while gyroscopes, accelerometers, and proximity sensors can be used to extract contextual information about the users, such as driving or walking states [75,122]. Further, additional sensors can be easily interfaced with smartphones via Bluetooth or wired connections, such as temperature, air quality, and humidity [69,168].These technological features, combined with the advanced sensing capability of humans, has spurred a significant amount of research from both academia and industry, which together have proposed over the last 10 years a myriad of applications based on the emerging mobile crowdsensing paradigm 1 . Mobile crowdsensing empowers ordinary citizens (or users 2 ) with the capability to actively monitor various phenomena pertaining to themselves (e.g., health, social connections) or their community (e.g., environment). This rich information or inference about themselves or the community may also be sent back to the participating or other concerned users to improve their life experiences, thus influencing their choices. Real-life applications, which can take advantage of both low-level sensor data and high-level user activities, range from real-time traffic monitoring applications, to environmental pollution monitoring, crime monitoring, and social networking, just to name a few. For a survey on mobile crowdsensin...

No abstract

A major challenge in mobile crowdsensing applications is the generation of false (or spam) contributions resulting from selfish and malicious behaviors of users, or wrong perception of an event. Such false contributions induce loss of revenue owing to undue incentivization, and also affect the operational reliability of the applications. To counter these problems, we propose an event-trust and user-reputation model, called QnQ, to segregate different user classes such as honest, selfish, or malicious. The resultant user reputation scores, are based on both 'quality' (accuracy of contribution) and 'quantity' (degree of participation) of their contributions. Specifically, QnQ exploits a rating feedback mechanism for evaluating an event-specific expected truthfulness, which is then transformed into a robust quality of information (QoI) metric to weaken various effects of selfish and malicious user behaviors. Eventually, the QoIs of various events in which a user has participated are aggregated to compute his reputation score, which in turn is used to judiciously disburse user incentives with a goal to reduce the incentive losses of the CS application provider. Subsequently, inspired by cumulative prospect theory (CPT), we propose a risk tolerance and reputation aware trustworthy decision making scheme to determine whether an event should be published or not, thus improving the operational reliability of the application. To evaluate QnQ experimentally, we consider a vehicular crowdsensing application as a proof-of-concept. We compare QoI performance achieved by our model with Jøsang's belief model, reputation scoring with Dempster-Shafer based reputation model, and operational (decision) accuracy with expected utility theory. Experimental results demonstrate that QnQ is able to better capture subtle differences in user behaviors based on both quality and quantity, reduces incentive losses and significantly improves operational accuracy in presence of rogue contributions.

The effect of patient position on mask ventilation, laryngoscopic view, intubation difficulty, and the stance adopted by the anesthesiologist during laryngoscopy and tracheal intubation was investigated in 546 anesthetized adults in this prospective, randomized study. Patients were randomly assigned to either the sniffing position group or the simple extension group. The distribution of Cormack grades was comparable between the two groups (P = 0.144). The IDS score [median (IQR)] was 0 (0–2) in the sniffing group and 1 (0–2) in the simple extension group; P = 0.002. There were significant differences between groups with regard to intensity of lifting force, external laryngeal manipulation, alternate techniques used, number of attempts, and the stance adopted by anesthesiologist. We conclude that the sniffing position is superior to simple head extension with regard to ease of intubation as assessed by IDS. An upright stance is adopted by more anesthesiologists performing intubation with patients in the sniffing position.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract