Crowdsourcing becomes a popular data-collection method to relieve the burden of high cost and latency for data-gathering. Since the involved users in crowdsourcing are volunteers, need incentives to encourage them to provide data. However, the current incentive mechanisms mostly pay attention to the data quantity, while ignoring the data quality. In this paper, we design a Data-quality awaRe IncentiVe mEchanism (DRIVE) for collaborative tasks based on the Stackelberg game to motivate users with high quality, the highlight of which is the dynamic reward allocation scheme based on the proposed data quality evaluation method. In order to guarantee the data quality evaluation response in real-time, we introduce the mobile edge computing framework. Finally, one case study is given and its real-data experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DRIVE.

In this paper, we propose a WiFi-based indoor positioning system using a fingerprint method, whose database is constructed with estimated reference locations. The reference locations and their information, called data sets in this paper, are obtained by moving reference devices at a constant speed while gathering information of available access points (APs). In this approach, the reference locations can be estimated using the velocity without any precise reference location information. Therefore, the cost of database construction can be dramatically reduced. However, each data set includes some errors due to such as the fluctuation of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values, the device-specific WiFi sensitivities, the AP installations, and removals. In this paper, we propose a method to merge data sets to construct a consistent database suppressing such undesired effects. The proposed approach assumes that the intervals of reference locations in the database are constant and that the fingerprint for each reference location is calculated from multiple data sets. Through experimental results, we reveal that our approach can achieve an accuracy of 80%. We also show a detailed discussion on the results related parameters in the proposed approach.

In this paper, we consider network monitoring techniques to estimate communication qualities in wide-area mobile networks, where an enormous number of heterogeneous components such as base stations, routers, and servers are deployed. We assume that average delays of neighboring base stations are comparable, most of servers have small delays, and delays at core routers are negligible. Under these assumptions, we propose Heterogeneous Delay Tomography (HDT) to estimate the average delay at each network component from end-to-end round trip times (RTTs) between mobile terminals and servers. HDT employs a crowdsourcing approach to collecting RTTs, where voluntary mobile users report their empirical RTTs to a data collection center. From the collected RTTs, HDT estimates average delays at base stations in the Graph Fourier Transform (GFT) domain and average delays at servers, by means of Compressed Sensing (CS). In the crowdsourcing approach, the performance of HDT may be degraded when the voluntary mobile users are unevenly distributed. To resolve this problem, we further extend HDT by considering the number of voluntary mobile users. With simulation experiments, we evaluate the performance of HDT.

Ground-truth identification - the process, which infers the most probable labels, for a certain dataset, from crowdsourcing annotations - is a crucial task to make the dataset usable, e.g., for a supervised learning problem. Nevertheless, the process is challenging because annotations from multiple annotators are inconsistent and noisy. Existing methods require a set of data sample with corresponding ground-truth labels to precisely estimate annotator performance but such samples are difficult to obtain in practice. Moreover, the process requires a post-editing step to validate indefinite labels, which are generally unidentifiable without thoroughly inspecting the whole annotated data. To address the challenges, this paper introduces: 1) Attenuated score (A-score) - an indicator that locally measures annotator performance for segments of annotation sequences, and 2) label aggregation method that applies A-score for ground-truth identification. The experimental results demonstrate that A-score label aggregation outperforms majority vote in all datasets by accurately recovering more labels. It also achieves higher F1 scores than those of the strong baselines in all multi-class data. Additionally, the results suggest that A-score is a promising indicator that helps identifying indefinite labels for the post-editing procedure.

To support the efficient gathering of diverse information about a news event, we focus on descriptions of named entities (persons, organizations, locations) in news articles. We extend the stakeholder mining proposed by Ogawa et al. and extract descriptions of named entities in articles. We propose three measures (difference in opinion, difference in details, and difference in factor coverage) to rank news articles on the basis of analyzing differences in descriptions of named entities. On the basis of these three measurements, we develop a news app on mobile devices to help users to acquire diverse reports for improving their understanding of the news. For the current article a user is reading, the proposed news app will rank and provide its related articles from different perspectives by the three ranking measurements. One of the notable features of our system is to consider the access history to provide the related news articles. In other words, we propose a context-aware re-ranking method for enhancing the diversity of news reports presented to users. We evaluate our three measurements and the re-ranking method with a crowdsourcing experiment and a user study, respectively.

We propose a method for finding an appropriate setting of a pay-per-performance payment system to prevent participation of insincere workers in crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing enables fast and low-cost accomplishment of tasks; however, insincere workers prevent the task requester from obtaining high-quality results. Instead of a fixed payment system, the pay-per-performance payment system is promising for excluding insincere workers. However, it is difficult to learn what settings are better, and a naive payment setting may cause unsatisfactory outcomes. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a method for calculating the expected payments for sincere and insincere workers, and then clarifying the conditions in the payment setting in which sincere workers are willing to choose a task, while insincere workers are not willing to choose the task. We evaluated the proposed method by conducting several experiments on tweet labeling tasks in Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results suggest that the pay-per-performance system is useful for preventing participation of insincere workers.