Toward QoI and Energy Efficiency in Participatory Crowdsourcing

Today's smartphones are also fundamentally transforming the traditional understanding of “crowdsourcing” to an emerging type of participatory task-oriented application. It aims to support the so-called “Citizen Science efforts” for knowledge discovery to understand human behavior and measure/evaluate their opinions. To facilitate these scenarios, in this paper, we propose a novel efficient network management framework for participatory crowdsourcing. Specifically, we first formulate the optimization problem and propose a closed-form optimal solution to meet the quality-of-information (QoI) requirements of the task while minimizing the energy consumption variance among participants. We then largely extend the traditional framework of Gur Game for distributed decision making to recommend different levels of information contribution for each participant by merging multiple automaton chains into a single chain with multiple steady states. By modeling the user bidding behaviors, we propose a few incentive-based participant selection schemes to maximize the platform's benefits and meet participants' expectations. We extensively evaluate the proposed schemes under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Social Evolution data set, where both QoI requirements of the request and credit saving are successfully achieved, with a satisfactory level of energy consumption fairness among participants.