Themain idea behind social participatory sensing is to leverage social friends to participate in mobile sensing tasks. A main challenge, however, is the identification and recruitment of sufficient number of well-suited participants. This becomes especially more challenging for large-scale online social networks with unknown network topology and complex friendship relations. Moreover, the poten...

We propose a new Bayesian model for reliable aggregation of crowdsourced estimates of real-valued quantities in participatory sensing applications. Existing approaches focus on probabilistic modelling of user’s reliability as the key to accurate aggregation. However, these are either limited to estimating discrete quantities, or require a significant number of reports from each user to accurate...

We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware system for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing tasks to be distributed across participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data reports back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation...

Whereas point sources of nutrients are well understood and controllable, there is growing concern about non-point sources, especially those that are related to individual property owners. Modeling tools were used to analyze and visualize the fate of nitrogen from three anthropogenic sources: septic tanks, atmospheric deposition, and fertilizer. Our results suggest that septic tanks may be a les...

Research in paediatric nursing, paediatric psychology, health care management and environment-behaviour studies suggest that there are many obstacles in completing qualitative research in health care settings with children and young people. As a result, the evidence from this kind of research is limited. Both authors have recently completed participatory qualitative studies with children and yo...

The LifeCLEF plant identification challenge aims at evaluating plant identification methods and systems at a very large scale, close to the conditions of a real-world biodiversity monitoring scenario. The 2016-th edition was actually conducted on a set of more than 110K images illustrating 1000 plant species living in West Europe, built through a large-scale participatory sensing platform initi...

We study repeated games with discounting where perfect monitoring is possible, but costly. It is shown that if players can make public announcements, then every payoff vector which is an interior point in the set of feasible and individually rational payoffs can be implemented in a sequential equilibrium of the repeated game when the discount factor is high enough. Thus, efficiency can be appro...

BACKGROUND The Aboriginal Women's Cancer Care Project used a participatory research model guided by an Aboriginal advisory group. METHODS The researchers attempted to conduct cancer research with 5 culturally and geographically different communities in North America. RESULTS We discuss the challenges of conducting ethical research in keeping with the emergent research principles of communit...

Starting from an agent-based model of the coffee market in the state of Veracruz, we conducted participatory simulation experiments where human players were given the roles of reactive agents. The simulations were tuned to favor the apparition of coalitions among coffee producers. In addition to the expected coalitions, we witnessed another kind of emergence: roles were specialized with the app...