Towards Practical Mobile Crowdsourcing: From Mechanism Design to Software Implementation

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Towards Practical Mobile Crowdsourcing: From Mechanism Design to 
Software Implementation"

by

Mr. Yanrong KANG


Abstract:

With the development of wireless networks and the proliferation of mobile 
devices, mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) has enabled us to collect and analyze 
real word data with unprecedented coverage and intelligence. Mobile 
crowdsourcing has inspired many applications and systems, bringing great 
convenience to research, production and people’s daily life. Yet to 
further enjoy the benefit of MCS, we still face many challenges ranging 
from mechanism design to system implementation. In this thesis, we address 
three challenging topics in mobile crowdsourcing. They are task management 
for quality control, incentive mechanism design and mobile apps 
development during MCS system implementation. For each topic, we focus on 
certain scenarios and specific problems.

First, we considers the quality-aware online assignment problem for 
location-based tasks, which are typical in mobile crowdsourcing. A 
probabilistic quality measurement model is proposed and a hitchhiking 
model is introduced to characterize workers’ behavior. After 
mathematically formulating the online assignment problem, a 
polynomial-time online assignment algorithm is designed to optimize tasks’ 
overall quality. The proposed algorithm is proven to approximates the 
offline optimal solution with a competitive ratio of 10 7 . Its efficiency 
and effectiveness is further demonstrated through extensive simulations.

Crowdsouced mobile network access (CMNA), or user-provided connectivity, 
provides more flexible and ubiquitous Internet access among mobile users. 
In the second work, we study the incentive mechanism for an 
operator-assisted CMNA model. In this model, subscribers are incentivized 
by a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to operate as mobile WiFi hot 
spots. Subscribers earns reimbursement from MVNO and MVNO gets revenue 
from the relayed traffic. Their equilibrium strategies are characterized 
on the basis of probabilistic analysis as a two-stage Bayesian game. A 
partial cooperation strategy (PCS) is designed for MVNO and subscribers to 
optimize their benefit, which is more practical (compared with symmetric 
strategy) and incurs much less overhead.

As most MCS systems rely on mobile apps on smartphones as terminals, 
mobile apps development is a critical part in MCS systems implementation. 
Lastly we target at the resource management problem during mobile apps 
development. If the various resources are misused, severe problems may 
occur. We mine resource management specifications in a crowdsourced way 
and a tool called Automatic Resource Specification Miner (ARSM) is 
developed. ARSM collects the usage of resources related APIs from 
off-the-shelf apps, which come from the developer crowd. Then it mines 
frequent patterns from the gathered resource usage information. With the 
help of ARSM, resource management specifications could guide software 
engineers while developing apps and pinpointing bugs.


Date:			Tuesday, 26 April 2016

Time:                  	4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3588
                         (lifts 27/28)

Committee Members:	Dr. Lei Chen (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Qiong Luo (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Cunsheng Ding
  			Dr. Ke Yi


**** ALL are Welcome ****