PARE:Privacy-Preserving Data Reliability Evaluation for Spatial Crowdsourcing in Internet of Things

The proliferation of intelligent,connected Internet of Things(IoT)devices facilitates data collection.However,task workers may be reluctant to participate in data collection due to privacy concerns,and task requesters may be concerned about the validity of the collected data.Hence,it is vital to evaluate the quality of the data collected by the task workers while protecting privacy in spatial crowdsourcing(SC)data collection tasks with IoT.To this end,this paper proposes a privacy-preserving data reliability evaluation for SC in IoT,named PARE.First,we design a data uploading format using blockchain and Paillier homomorphic cryptosystem,providing unchangeable and traceable data while overcoming privacy concerns.Secondly,based on the uploaded data,we propose a method to determine the approximate correct value region without knowing the exact value.Finally,we offer a data filtering mechanism based on the Paillier cryptosystem using this value region.The evaluation and analysis results show that PARE outperforms the existing solution in terms of performance and privacy protection.

Blockchain-Assisted Unsupervised Learning Method for Crowdsourcing Reputation Management

Crowdsourcing holds broad applications in information acquisition and dissemination,yet encounters challenges pertaining to data quality assessment and user reputation management.Reputation mechanisms stand as crucial solutions for appraising and updating participant reputation scores,thereby elevating the quality and dependability of crowdsourced data.However,these mechanisms face several challenges in traditional crowdsourcing systems:1)platform security lacks robust guarantees and may be susceptible to attacks;2)there exists a potential for large-scale privacy breaches;and 3)incentive mechanisms relying on reputation scores may encounter issues as reputation updates hinge on task demander evaluations,occasionally lacking a dedicated reputation update module.This paper introduces a reputation update scheme tailored for crowdsourcing,with a focus on proficiently overseeing participant reputations and alleviating the impact of malicious activities on the sensing system.Here,the reputation update scheme is determined by an Empirical Cumulative distribution-based Outlier Detection method(ECOD).Our scheme embraces a blockchain-based crowdsourcing framework utilizing a homomorphic encryption method to ensure data transparency and tamper-resistance.Computation of user reputation scores relies on their behavioral history,actively discouraging undesirable conduct.Additionally,we introduce a dynamic weight incentive mechanism that mirrors alterations in participant reputation,enabling the system to allocate incentives based on user behavior and reputation.Our scheme undergoes evaluation on 11 datasets,revealing substantial enhancements in data credibility for crowdsourcing systems and a reduction in the influence of malicious behavior.This research not only presents a practical solution for crowdsourcing reputation management but also offers valuable insights for future research and applications,holding promise for fostering more reliable and high-quality data collection in crowdsourcing across diverse domains.

Mobile Crowdsourcing Task Allocation Based on Dynamic Self-Attention GANs

Crowdsourcing technology is widely recognized for its effectiveness in task scheduling and resource allocation.While traditional methods for task allocation can help reduce costs and improve efficiency,they may encounter challenges when dealing with abnormal data flow nodes,leading to decreased allocation accuracy and efficiency.To address these issues,this study proposes a novel two-part invalid detection task allocation framework.In the first step,an anomaly detection model is developed using a dynamic self-attentive GAN to identify anomalous data.Compared to the baseline method,the model achieves an approximately 4%increase in the F1 value on the public dataset.In the second step of the framework,task allocation modeling is performed using a twopart graph matching method.This phase introduces a P-queue KM algorithm that implements a more efficient optimization strategy.The allocation efficiency is improved by approximately 23.83%compared to the baseline method.Empirical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in detecting abnormal data nodes,enhancing allocation precision,and achieving efficient allocation.

Transformer-Aided Deep Double Dueling Spatial-Temporal Q-Network for Spatial Crowdsourcing Analysis

With the rapid development ofmobile Internet,spatial crowdsourcing has becomemore andmore popular.Spatial crowdsourcing consists of many different types of applications,such as spatial crowd-sensing services.In terms of spatial crowd-sensing,it collects and analyzes traffic sensing data from clients like vehicles and traffic lights to construct intelligent traffic prediction models.Besides collecting sensing data,spatial crowdsourcing also includes spatial delivery services like DiDi and Uber.Appropriate task assignment and worker selection dominate the service quality for spatial crowdsourcing applications.Previous research conducted task assignments via traditional matching approaches or using simple network models.However,advanced mining methods are lacking to explore the relationship between workers,task publishers,and the spatio-temporal attributes in tasks.Therefore,in this paper,we propose a Deep Double Dueling Spatial-temporal Q Network(D3SQN)to adaptively learn the spatialtemporal relationship between task,task publishers,and workers in a dynamic environment to achieve optimal allocation.Specifically,D3SQNis revised through reinforcement learning by adding a spatial-temporal transformer that can estimate the expected state values and action advantages so as to improve the accuracy of task assignments.Extensive experiments are conducted over real data collected fromDiDi and ELM,and the simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed models.

Optimizing Spatial Crowdsourcing:A Quality-Aware Task Assignment Approach for Mobile Communication

The widespread use of advanced electronic devices has led to the emergence of spatial crowdsourcing,a method that taps into collective efforts to perform real-world tasks like environmental monitoring and traffic surveillance.Our research focuses on a specific type of spatial crowdsourcing that involves ongoing,collaborative efforts for continuous spatial data acquisition.However,due to limited budgets and workforce availability,the collected data often lacks completeness,posing a data deficiency problem.To address this,we propose a reciprocal framework to optimize task assignments by leveraging the mutual benefits of spatiotemporal subtask execution.We introduce an entropy-based quality metric to capture the combined effects of incomplete data acquisition and interpolation imprecision.Building on this,we explore a quality-aware task assignment method,corresponding to spatiotemporal assignment strategies.Since the assignment problem is NP-hard,we develop a polynomial-time algorithm with the guaranteed approximation ratio.Novel indexing and pruning techniques are proposed to further enhance performance.Extensive experiments conducted on datasets validate the effectiveness of our methods.

P&T-Inf: A Result Inference Method for Context-Sensitive Tasks in Crowdsourcing

Context-Sensitive Task(CST)is a complex task type in crowdsourc-ing,such as handwriting recognition,route plan,and audio transcription.The current result inference algorithms can perform well in simple crowd-sourcing tasks,but cannot obtain high-quality inference results for CSTs.The conventional method to solve CSTs is to divide a CST into multiple independent simple subtasks for crowdsourcing,but this method ignores the context correlation among subtasks and reduces the quality of result inference.To solve this problem,we propose a result inference algorithm based on the Partially ordered set and Tree augmented naive Bayes Infer(P&T-Inf)for CSTs.Firstly,we screen the candidate results of context-sensitive tasks based on the partially ordered set.If there are parallel candidate sets,the conditional mutual information among subtasks containing context infor-mation in external knowledge(such as Google n-gram corpus,American Contemporary English corpus,etc.)will be calculated.Combined with the tree augmented naive(TAN)Bayes model,the maximum weighted spanning tree is used to model the dependencies among subtasks in each CST.We collect two crowdsourcing datasets of handwriting recognition tasks and audio transcription tasks from the real crowdsourcing platform.The experimental results show that our approach improves the quality of result inference in CSTs and reduces the time cost compared with the latest methods.

兼容Crowdsourcing的灾害应急管理系统

Crowdsourcing是作为一种新的商业模式发展起来的,随着社交网络、移动互联网的发展,已经发展成为一种新的信息交互方式,推动了新的网络信息生产与交流模式的产生.在近年来的全球灾害救援过程中,公众发布的大量信息发挥了巨大作用.将crowdsourcing模式吸纳入灾害救援应用中,可以有效地利用现有信息化手段,提高灾害信息采集效率与救援效果.本文基于灾害救援现状与crowdsourcing模式,对灾害信息的生产、传播和消费过程进行分析,研究了crowdsourcing模式引入灾害信息管理与灾害救援应用的可行性和关键问题.在此基础上,分析研究了兼容crowdsourcing的灾害应急管理系统的内容与架构.文章研究表明,在与SNS平台进行充分对接的前提下,将crowdsourcing模式引入灾害信息管理与救援应用具有技术可行性,同时也提出了需要进一步研究的一些问题.

RTRC:A Reputation-Based Incentive Game Model for Trustworthy Crowdsourcing Service

The ubiquity of mobile devices have promoted the prosperity of mobile crowd systems, which recruit crowds to contribute their resources for performing tasks. Yet, due to the various resource consumption, the crowds may be reluctant to join and contribute information. Thus, the low participation level of crowds will be a hurdle that prevents the adoption of crowdsourcing. A critical challenge for these systems is how to design a proper mechanism such that the crowds spontaneously act as suppliers to contribute accurate information. Most of existing mechanisms ignore either the honesty of crowds or requesters respectively. In this paper, considering the honesty of both, we propose a game-based incentive mechanism, namely RTRC, to stimulate the crowds to contribute accurate information and to motivate the requesters to return accurate feedbacks. In addition, an evolutionary game is designed to model the dynamic of user-strategy selection. Specially, the replicator dynamic is applied to model the adaptation of strategy interactions taking into account the dynamic nature in time dependence and we also derive the evolutionarily stable strategies(ESSs) for users. Finally, empirical results over the simulations show that all the requesters and suppliers will select honest strategy to maximize their profit.

Exploring Barriers and Opportunities in Adopting Crowdsourcing Based New Product Development in Manufacturing SMEs

Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people （the ＇Crowd＇）. The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in new product development （NPD） of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business.

Extraction of Information from Crowdsourcing: Experimental Test Employing Bayesian, Maximum Likelihood, and Maximum Entropy Methods

A crowdsourcing experiment in which viewers (the “crowd”) of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television show submitted estimates of the number of coins in a tumbler was shown in an antecedent paper (Part 1) to follow a log-normal distribution ∧(m,s2). The coin-estimation experiment is an archetype of a broad class of image analysis and object counting problems suitable for solution by crowdsourcing. The objective of the current paper (Part 2) is to determine the location and scale parameters (m,s) of ∧(m,s2) by both Bayesian and maximum likelihood (ML) methods and to compare the results. One outcome of the analysis is the resolution, by means of Jeffreys’ rule, of questions regarding the appropriate Bayesian prior. It is shown that Bayesian and ML analyses lead to the same expression for the location parameter, but different expressions for the scale parameter, which become identical in the limit of an infinite sample size. A second outcome of the analysis concerns use of the sample mean as the measure of information of the crowd in applications where the distribution of responses is not sought or known. In the coin-estimation experiment, the sample mean was found to differ widely from the mean number of coins calculated from ∧(m,s2). This discordance raises critical questions concerning whether, and under what conditions, the sample mean provides a reliable measure of the information of the crowd. This paper resolves that problem by use of the principle of maximum entropy (PME). The PME yields a set of equations for finding the most probable distribution consistent with given prior information and only that information. If there is no solution to the PME equations for a specified sample mean and sample variance, then the sample mean is an unreliable statistic, since no measure can be assigned to its uncertainty. Parts 1 and 2 together demonstrate that the information content of crowdsourcing resides in the distribution of responses (very often log-normal in form), which can be obtained empirically or by appropriate modeling.

Research on Crowdsourcing Price Game Model in Crowd Sensing

Crowd-Sensing is an innovative data acquisition method that combines the perception of mobile devices with the idea of crowdsourcing.It is a new application mode under the development of the Internet of Things.The perceptual data that mobile users can provide is limited.Multiple crowdsourcing parties will share this limited data,but the cost that the crowdsourcing party can pay is limited,and enough mobile users are needed to complete the perceptual task,making the group wisdom is really played.In this process,there is bound to be a game between the crowds and the mobile users.Most of the existing researches consider a group-aware system.A group of mobile users will directly share or compete for the opportunity of the crowd-holders to do tasks and get paid,the behavior of multiple crowd-source parties,and their bilateral interaction with mobile users.The research is not clear enough and there is no targeted research.This paper will model and analyze the dynamic evolution process of crowd sensing perception.Based on the unique characteristics of crowd-source non-cooperative game and crowd-sourced Nash equilibrium,we will develop a perceptual plan for mobile users and use the stability analysis of iterative algorithms to explore a way to better match the capabilities of mobile users and the needs of crowdsourced parties.Our theoretical analysis and simulation results verify the dynamic evolution model of crowdsourcing in group perception and propose a method to improve the efficiency of crowdsourcing.

Knowledge Learning With Crowdsourcing:A Brief Review and Systematic Perspective

Big data have the characteristics of enormous volume,high velocity,diversity,value-sparsity,and uncertainty,which lead the knowledge learning from them full of challenges.With the emergence of crowdsourcing,versatile information can be obtained on-demand so that the wisdom of crowds is easily involved to facilitate the knowledge learning process.During the past thirteen years,researchers in the AI community made great efforts to remove the obstacles in the field of learning from crowds.This concentrated survey paper comprehensively reviews the technical progress in crowdsourcing learning from a systematic perspective that includes three dimensions of data,models,and learning processes.In addition to reviewing existing important work,the paper places a particular emphasis on providing some promising blueprints on each dimension as well as discussing the lessons learned from our past research work,which will light up the way for new researchers and encourage them to pursue new contributions.

Multi-Objective Task Assignment for Maximizing Social Welfare in Spatio-Temporal Crowdsourcing

With the development of the Internet of Things(IoT),spatio-temporal crowdsourcing(mobile crowdsourcing)has become an emerging paradigm for addressing location-based sensing tasks.However,the delay caused by network transmission has led to low data processing efficiency.Fortunately,edge computing can solve this problem,effectively reduce the delay of data transmission,and improve data processing capacity,so that the crowdsourcing platform can make better decisions faster.Therefore,this paper combines spatio-temporal crowdsourcing and edge computing to study the Multi-Objective Optimization Task Assignment(MOO-TA)problem in the edge computing environment.The proposed online incentive mechanism considers the task difficulty attribute to motivate crowd workers to perform sensing tasks in the unpopular area.In this paper,the Weighted and Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Combination(WAMOPSC)algorithm is proposed to maximize both platform’s and crowd workers’utility,so as to maximize social welfare.The algorithm combines the traditional Linear Weighted Summation(LWS)algorithm and Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization(MOPSO)algorithm to find pareto optimal solutions of multi-objective optimization task assignment problem as much as possible for crowdsourcing platform to choose.Through comparison experiments on real data sets,the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are evaluated.

Mapping Cropland in Ethiopia Using Crowdsourcing

The spatial distribution of cropland is an important input to many applications including food security monitoring and economic land use modeling. Global land cover maps derived from remote sensing are one source of cropland but they are currently not accurate enough in the cropland domain to meet the needs of the user community. Moreover, when compared with one another, these land cover products show large areas of spatial disagreement, which makes the choice very difficult regarding which land cover product to use. This paper takes an entirely different approach to mapping cropland, using crowdsourcing of Google Earth imagery via tools in Geo-Wiki. Using sample data generated by a crowdsourcing campaign for the collection of the degree of cultivation and settlement in Ethiopia, a cropland map was created using simple inverse distance weighted interpolation. The map was validated using data from the GOFC-GOLD validation portal and an independent crowdsourced dataset from Geo-Wiki. The results show that the crowdsourced cropland map for Ethiopia has a higher overall accuracy than the individual global land cover products for this country. Such an approach has great potential for mapping cropland in other countries where such data do not currently exist. Not only is the approach inexpensive but the data can be collected over a very short period of time using an existing network of volunteers.

Multi-stage online task assignment driven by offline data under spatio-temporal crowdsourcing

In the era of the Internet of Things(IoT),the crowdsourcing process is driven by data collected by devices that interact with each other and with the physical world.As a part of the IoT ecosystem,task assignment has become an important goal of the research community.Existing task assignment algorithms can be categorized as offline(performs better with datasets but struggles to achieve good real-life results)or online(works well with real-life input but is difficult to optimize regarding in-depth assignments).This paper proposes a Cross-regional Online Task(CROT)assignment problem based on the online assignment model.Given the CROT problem,an Online Task Assignment across Regions based on Prediction(OTARP)algorithm is proposed.OTARP is a two-stage graphics-driven bilateral assignment strategy that uses edge cloud and graph embedding to complete task assignments.The first stage uses historical data to make offline predictions,with a graph-driven method for offline bipartite graph matching.The second stage uses a bipartite graph to complete the online task assignment process.This paper proposes accelerating the task assignment process through multiple assignment rounds and optimizing the process by combining offline guidance and online assignment strategies.To encourage crowd workers to complete crowd tasks across regions,an incentive strategy is designed to encourage crowd workers’movement.To avoid the idle problem in the process of crowd worker movement,a drop-by-rider problem is used to help crowd workers accept more crowd tasks,optimize the number of assignments,and increase utility.Finally,through comparison experiments on real datasets,the performance of the proposed algorithm on crowd worker utility value and the matching number is evaluated.

A Crowdsourcing Recommendation that Considers the Influence of Workers

In the context of the continuous development of the Internet,crowdsourcing has received continuous attention as a new cooperation model based on the relationship between enterprises,the public and society.Among them,a reasonably designed recommendation algorithm can recommend a batch of suitable workers for crowdsourcing tasks to improve the final task completion quality.Therefore,this paper proposes a crowdsourcing recommendation framework based on workers’influence(CRBI).This crowdsourcing framework completes the entire process design from task distribution,worker recommendation,and result return through processes such as worker behavior analysis,task characteristics construction,and cost optimization.In this paper,a calculation model of workers’influence characteristics based on the ablation method is designed to evaluate the comprehensive performance of workers.At the same time,the CRBI framework combines the traditional open-call task selection mode,builds a new task characteristics model by sensing the influence of the requesting worker and its task performance.In the end,accurate worker recommendation and task cost optimization are carried out by calculating model familiarity.In addition,for recommending workers to submit task answers,this paper also proposes an aggregation algorithm based on weighted influence to ensure the accuracy of task results.This paper conducts simulation experiments on some public datasets of AMT,and the experimental results show that the CRBI framework proposed in this paper has a high comprehensive performance.Moreover,CRBI has better usability,more in line with commercial needs,and can well reflect the wisdom of group intelligence.

Crowdsourcing-Based Framework for Teaching Quality Evaluation and Feedback Using Linguistic 2-Tuple

Crowdsourcing is widely used in various fields to collect goods and services from large participants.Evaluating teaching quality by collecting feedback from experts or students after class is not only delayed but also not accurate.In this paper,we present a crowdsourcing-based framework to evaluate teaching quality in the classroom using a weighted average operator to aggregate information from students’questionnaires described by linguistic 2-tuple terms.Then we define crowd grade based on similarity degree to distinguish contribution from different students and minimize the abnormal students’impact on the evaluation.The crowd grade would be updated at the end of each feedback so it can guarantee the evaluation accurately.Moreover,a simulated case is shown to illustrate how to apply this framework to assess teaching quality in the classroom.Finally,we developed a prototype and carried out some experiments on a series of real questionnaires and two sets of modified data.The results show that teachers can locate the weak points of teaching and furthermore to identify the abnormal students to improve the teaching quality.Meanwhile,our approach provides a strong tolerance for the abnormal student to make the evaluation more accurate.

Anonymous crowdsourcing-based WLAN indoor localization

In order to solve the problem of location privacy under big data and improve the user positioning experience,a new concept of anonymous crowdsourcing-based WLAN indoor localization is proposed by employing the Micro-Electro-Mechanical System(MEMS)motion sensors as well as WLAN module in off-the-shelf smartphones.First of all,the crowdsourced motion traces with similar Received Signal Strength(RSS)sequences are assembled into a motion graph.Second,the mobility map is constructed according to traces segmentation and clustering.Third,the pixel template matching is adopted to physically label the pre-constructed mobility map.Finally,the robust Extended Kalman Filter(EKF)is designed to perform localization by matching the newly-collected RSS measurements against the mobility map.The extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of constructing a physically-labeled mobility map from the sporadically-collected crowdsourced motion traces as well as achieving satisfactory localization accuracy in a cost-efficient manner.

Enabling Privacy Preservation and Decentralization for Attribute-Based Task Assignment in Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing allows people who are endowed with certain skills to accomplish special tasks with incentive. Despite the state-of-art crowdsourcing schemes have guaranteed low overhead and considerable quality, most of them expose task content and user’s attribute information to a centralized server. These servers are vulnerable to single points of failure, the leakage of user’s privacy information, and lacking of transparency. We therefore explored an alternative design for task assignment based on the emerging decentralized blockchain technology. While enabling the advantages of the public blockchain, changing to open operations requires some additional technology and design to preserve the privacy of user’s information. To mitigate this issue, we proposed a secure task assignment scheme, which enables task content preservation and anonymous attribute requirement checking. Specifically, by adopting the cryptographic techniques, the proposed scheme enables task requester to safely place his task in a transparent blockchain. Furthermore, the proposed scheme divides the attribute verification process into public pre-verification and requester verification, so that the requester can check only the identity of the worker, instead of verifying the attributes one by one, thereby preserving the identity of worker while significantly reducing the requester’s calculation burden. Additionally, security analysis demonstrated unrelated entities cannot learn about the task content and identity information from all data uploaded by requester and worker. Performance evaluation showed the low computational overhead of our scheme.

Hashtags as Crowdsourcing: A Case Study of Arabic Hashtags on Twitter

This mixed study aims to highlight the impact of social media in the Arab world, specifically Twitter’s impact on translators’ communities. For this purpose, the role of hashtags among translators will be examined by investigating one particular Arabic hashtag, its purpose, target users, and the classification of content. The hashtag is , #translator_serving_translator. 1) An online survey of six closed questions was employed and posted on Twitter, and 249 responses show that users are from fourteen Arab countries, and the majority is from Saudi Arabia. Hashtag users are translators, freelancers, or TS students. Some are active users who post tweets and answer questions, others only ask questions, and the rest only read tweets. The general attitude toward employing hashtags among translators’ communities was positive. 2) Employing a content analysis approach, the content is classified into two main categories of sharing information and seeking assistance with seven subcategories of each.