Crowdsourcing for Large-Scale Pervasive Sensing

Crowdsourcing, or the act of outsourcing a task to the crowd, has the potential to revolutionize information collection and processing systems by enabling in-depth, large-scale, cost-effective information gathering, and more accurate techniques for information extraction from data. Crowdsourcing provides a powerful mechanism for creating data about the physical world, particularly through the use of mobile phones and their rich set of on-board sensors (GPS, audio, video, etc). These sensors can be utilized to provide continuous and unprecedented visibility into the state of the world across many scales. Crowdsourcing is also effective when humans are better than existing automated computer algorithms, for example labeling images, transcribing speech, annotating text, transcribing scanned documents, language translation, and others. Our research seeks to leverage crowdsourcing to address several hard challenges in pervasive computing systems.