Robust and Trusted Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd-Tasking in the Future Internet

Abstract

Abstract.A great majority of the EU citizens already owns a cellular phone. An increasing part of these phones are smartphones with a broadband internet connection. This growing network of smart internet enabled devices could act as a dense sensing network, as well as a tool for individual informing and tasking of mobile citizens and volunteers.In order to fully harvest this new resource, we need to understand its rules and develop adequate tools. This paper lists some of the peculiarities of ad-hoc volunteer networks supported by smartphones. It furthermore compares the capabilities and limitations of these networks with other means of observation gathering and activity coordination. This includes: (1) a reflection on the motivation for users participation; (2) human and technical limitations of smartphone-enabled volunteer networks; (3) legal and ethical challenges; (4) reliability and usability issues; as well as (5) issues related to trust and quality of information.The second part of the paper presents our experiences with design and prototypic development of the tools supporting volunteer efforts in the field of environmental monitoring, e-health and crisis management. This development is presented in a wider scope of the "Future Internet Public Private Partnership" research programme.Finally, the paper summarizes our findings and recommendations for further developments.

ENVIROFI - Bringing Biodiversity to the Future Internet

“…More technical information on the overall application architecture and on the specific enablers facilitating the development of FI-enabled VGI applications can be found in [14] and [15] respectively.…”

Future Internet technologies for environmental applications

“…ENVIROFI-BIO app represents a very popular class of crowdtasking or mobile VGI applications where mobile participants are provided with local situation awareness and asked to perform some simple tasks and contribute their own observations (Havlik et al, 2013b). Similar applications have been designed and deployed, for instance, to monitor citizens mobility patterns, fight illegal dumps, map street networks, and optimize traffic routing (Usl€ ander et al, 2013;Havlik and Schimak, 2014).…”

“…Typically, these SEs are used together to realize mobile Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) applications which combine local situation awareness, crowdsourcing of the observations (participatory sensing), and crowd-tasking to provide additional information and to assess the quality of the already provided observations (Havlik et al, 2013b). The set of SEs facilitates integration of data and processing capabilities realised by third party services and provides a way to push alerts and task requests to selected users.…”

Analyzing Spatial and Temporal User Behavior in Participatory Sensing

“…Although it is hard to estimate the exact number of existing participatory sensing applications to date (the surveys of Khan et al [12] and Guo et al [4] analyzed 45 and 66 applications, respectively), the 21 applications used in this comparison were selected from the growing list of participatory sensing examples, and at the same time they represent the diverse and complex nature of participatory sensing. Our comparison was performed along common features observed in literature: flexibility of the tool [32], the presence of incentive [33,34], the selection of data collectors [35,36], result delivery [37,38], identity of data collectors [39] and the flexibility of the sensing process [30] (see Table 1). Additionally, useful meta-data are listed: name and publication time of the application, theme covered, origin (industry or academia) and the status of the application (a research prototype or a complete product).…”