Crowdsourcing and Human‐in‐the‐Loop for IoT

Most advanced Internet of Things solutions today are more than just technology. This chapter first introduces crowdsourcing and human‐in‐the‐loop (HITL), two related approaches for realizing use cases and devises data science pipelines that seamlessly combine machine with human and collective intelligence. Broadly speaking, there are two main categories of crowdsourcing activity: microtask and macrotask crowdsourcing. These can be distinguished based on task granularity, or the amount of work required for – and by extension, the complexity of – the task assigned to individual workers. HITL and crowdsourcing are related, but there are important differences: crowdsourcing is a distributed problem‐solving approach. An important part of a crowdsourcing project is how to allocate the tasks to participants and how to validate and aggregate their contributions. HITL does not necessarily involve decentralization. The chapter also discusses two instances of crowdsourcing for location data: spatial crowdsourcing and citizen sensing, which are particularly relevant in a smart city context.