A Survey on Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing and Mobile Sensing

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing and Mobile Sensing"

by

Mr. Xinglin Zhang


Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed the fast proliferation of smartphones in 
people’s lives. In addition, off-the-shelf smartphones now possess 
powerful computation and communication capabilities, and are equipped with 
various built-in functional sensors.  The large quantity and high quality 
of smartphones create a new interface between human beings and 
environments.  Many mobile sensing applications thus have been designed, 
which recruit normal smartphone users to contribute their resources for 
certain sensing tasks. To guarantee good performance of such applications, 
it’s essential to recruit sufficient number of participants. Thus, how 
to efficiently and effectively motivate normal smartphone users draws 
growing attention to researchers. This survey reviews diverse strategies 
that are proposed in literature to provide incentives for stimulating 
smartphone users to participate in sensing applications.  The 
incentive mechanisms are mainly divided into the following categories: 
entertainment-based mechanisms, service-based mechanisms, and monetary 
mechanisms.  Each type of mechanisms emphasizes some aspects of user needs 
(e.g., enjoyment, comfort, fulfillment, making a profit, etc), and 
different mechanisms have the potential to be combined to efficiently 
incentivize users. Further challenges and possible future works in 
crowdsourcing-based sensing incentive mechanism design are also discussed 
in this survey.


Date:			Friday, 11 January 2013

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3494
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Lei Chen (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo
 			Dr. Ke Yi


**** ALL are Welcome ****