Optimizing information credibility in social swarming applications

Abstract

With the advent of smartphone technology, it has become possible to conceive of entirely new classes of applications. Social swarming, in which users armed with smartphones are directed by a central director to report on events in the physical world, has several real-world applications: search and rescue, coordinated fire-fighting, and the DARPA balloon hunt challenge. In this paper, we focus on the following problem: how does the director optimize the selection of reporters to deliver credible corroborating information about an event. We first propose a model, based on common intuitions of believability, about the credibility of information. We then cast the problem posed above as a discrete optimization problem, and introduce optimal centralized solutions and an approximate solution amenable to decentralized implementation whose performance is about 20% off on average from the optimal (on real-world datasets derived from Google News) while being 3 orders of magnitude more computationally efficient. More interesting, a time-averaged version of the problem is amenable to a novel stochastic utility optimization formulation, and can be solved optimally, while in some cases yielding decentralized solutions. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose and explore the problem of extracting credible information from a network of smartphones.

Distributed Stochastic Optimization via Correlated Scheduling

“…However, because the above vector is on the boundary of R, a simple extension of Caratheodory's theorem ensures it can be written using at most K +1 non-zero θ m values. 2 This proves Theorem 1.…”

“…The goal is to make distributed decisions that maximize time average quality of information. This scenario was previously considered by Liu et al in [2]. There, sensors can provide reports every slot t using one of multiple reporting formats, such as text, image, or video.…”

“…The prior work [2] considers the problem of maximizing time average utility subject to a time average power constraint:…”

Distributed stochastic optimization in networks with low informational exchange

“…In medium access control problem [9], users set their individual channel access probability to maximize their benefit. In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes collect information to serve a fusion center, an interesting problem is to make each node independently decide the quality of its report to maximize the average quality of information gathered by the fusion center subject to some power constraint [10], [11], note that a higher level of quality requires higher power consumption. This paper considers an optimization problem in a distributed network where each node adjusts its own action to maximize the global utility of the system, which is also perturbed by a stochastic process, e.g., wireless channels.…”

Quality of Information Maximization for Wireless Networks via a Fully Separable Quadratic Policy

“…More recently, quality metrics of accuracy and credibility are considered in [9], [10] using simplified models that do not consider the actual dynamics of a wireless network.…”