Mobile crowd sensing and computing: when participatory sensing meets participatory social media

With the development of mobile sensing and mobile social networking techniques, mobile crowd sensing and computing (MCSC), which leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data for large-scale sensing, has become a leading paradigm. Built on top of the participatory sensing vision, MCSC has two characteristic features: it leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data from two data sources: participatory sensing and participatory social media; and it presents the fusion of human and machine intelligence in both the sensing and computing processes. This article characterizes the unique features and challenges of MCSC. We further present early efforts on MCSC to demonstrate the benefits of aggregating heterogeneous crowdsourced data.