Incentive mechanism design for citizen reporting application using Stackelberg game

The growing utilization of smartphones equipped with various sensors to collect and analyze information around us highlights a paradigm called mobile crowdsensing. To motivate citizens’ participation in crowdsensing and compensate them for their resources, it is necessary to incentivize the participants for their sensing service. There are several studies that used the Stackelberg game to model the incentive mechanism, however, those studies did not include a budget constraint for limited budget case. Another challenge is to optimize crowdsourcer (government) profit in conducting crowdsensing under the limited budget then allocates the budget to several regional working units that are responsible for the specific city problems. We propose an incentive mechanism for mobile crowdsensing based on several identified incentive parameters using the Stackelberg game model and applied the MOOP (multi-objective optimization problem) to the incentive model in which the participant reputation is taken into account. The evaluation of the proposed incentive model is performed through simulations. The simulation indicated that the result appropriately corresponds to the theoretical properties of the model

Cloud/fog computing resource management and pricing for blockchain networks

The mining process in blockchain requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle, which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high computing power and energy needed. In this paper, we, for the first time, consider edge computing as an enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we study edge computing resource management and pricing to support mobile blockchain applications in which the mining process of miners can be offloaded to an edge computing service provider. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly maximize the profit of the edge computing service provider and the individual utilities of the miners. In the first stage, the service provider sets the price of edge computing nodes. In the second stage, the miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices. We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For the uniform pricing where the same price is applied to all miners, the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best response strategies of the miners. For the discriminatory pricing where the different prices are applied to different miners, the Stackelberg equilibrium is proved to exist and be unique by capitalizing on the Variational Inequality theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our proposed model.Comment: 16 pages, double-column version, accepted by IEEE Internet of Things Journa

A Stackelberg Game Approach Towards Socially-Aware Incentive Mechanisms for Mobile Crowdsensing (Online report)

Mobile crowdsensing has shown a great potential to address large-scale data sensing problems by allocating sensing tasks to pervasive mobile users. The mobile users will participate in a crowdsensing platform if they can receive satisfactory reward. In this paper, to effectively and efficiently recruit sufficient number of mobile users, i.e., participants, we investigate an optimal incentive mechanism of a crowdsensing service provider. We apply a two-stage Stackelberg game to analyze the participation level of the mobile users and the optimal incentive mechanism of the crowdsensing service provider using backward induction. In order to motivate the participants, the incentive is designed by taking into account the social network effects from the underlying mobile social domain. For example, in a crowdsensing-based road traffic information sharing application, a user can get a better and accurate traffic report if more users join and share their road information. We derive the analytical expressions for the discriminatory incentive as well as the uniform incentive mechanisms. To fit into practical scenarios, we further formulate a Bayesian Stackelberg game with incomplete information to analyze the interaction between the crowdsensing service provider and mobile users, where the social structure information (the social network effects) is uncertain. The existence and uniqueness of the Bayesian Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best response strategies of the mobile users. Numerical results corroborate the fact that the network effects tremendously stimulate higher mobile participation level and greater revenue of the crowdsensing service provider. In addition, the social structure information helps the crowdsensing service provider to achieve greater revenue gain.Comment: Submitted for possible journal publication. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.0105

Crowdcloud: A Crowdsourced System for Cloud Infrastructure

The widespread adoption of truly portable, smart devices and Do-It-Yourself computing platforms by the general public has enabled the rise of new network and system paradigms. This abundance of wellconnected, well-equipped, affordable devices, when combined with crowdsourcing methods, enables the development of systems with the aid of the crowd. In this work, we introduce the paradigm of Crowdsourced Systems, systems whose constituent infrastructure, or a significant part of it, is pooled from the general public by following crowdsourcing methodologies. We discuss the particular distinctive characteristics they carry and also provide their “canonical” architecture. We exemplify the paradigm by also introducing Crowdcloud, a crowdsourced cloud infrastructure where crowd members can act both as cloud service providers and cloud service clients. We discuss its characteristic properties and also provide its functional architecture. The concepts introduced in this work underpin recent advances in the areas of mobile edge/fog computing and co-designed/cocreated systems

Reliable Distributed Computing for Metaverse: A Hierarchical Game-Theoretic Approach

The metaverse is regarded as a new wave of technological transformation that provides a virtual space for people to interact through digital avatars. To achieve immersive user experiences in the metaverse, real-time rendering is the key technology. However, computing-intensive tasks of real-time rendering from metaverse service providers cannot be processed efficiently on a single resource-limited mobile device. Alternatively, such mobile devices can offload the metaverse rendering tasks to other mobile devices by adopting the collaborative computing paradigm based on Coded Distributed Computing (CDC). Therefore, this paper introduces a hierarchical game-theoretic CDC framework for the metaverse services, especially for the vehicular metaverse. In the framework, idle resources from vehicles, acting as CDC workers, are aggregated to handle intensive computation tasks in the vehicular metaverse. Specifically, in the upper layer, a miner coalition formation game is formulated based on a reputation metric to select reliable workers. To guarantee the reliable management of reputation values, the reputation values calculated based on the subjective logical model are maintained in a blockchain database. In the lower layer, a Stackelberg game-based incentive mechanism is considered to attract reliable workers selected in the upper layer to participate in rendering tasks. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework is resistant to malicious workers. Compared with the best-effort worker selection scheme, the proposed scheme can improve the utility of metaverse service provider and the average profit of CDC workers

Human–Computer Interaction and Participation in Software Crowdsourcing

Improvements in communication and networking technologies have transformed people’s lives and organizations’ activities. Web 2.0 innovation has provided a variety of hybridized applications and tools that have changed enterprises’ functional and communication processes. People use numerous platforms to broaden their social contacts, select items, execute duties, and learn new things. Context: Crowdsourcing is an internet-enabled problem-solving strategy that utilizes human–computer interaction to leverage the expertise of people to achieve business goals. In crowdsourcing approaches, three main entities work in collaboration to solve various problems. These entities are requestors (job providers), platforms, and online users. Tasks are announced by requestors on crowdsourcing platforms, and online users, after passing initial screening, are allowed to work on these tasks. Crowds participate to achieve various rewards. Motivation: Crowdsourcing is gaining importance as an alternate outsourcing approach in the software engineering industry. Crowdsourcing application development involves complicated tasks that vary considerably from the micro-tasks available on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. To obtain the tangible opportunities of crowdsourcing in the realm of software development, corporations should first grasp how this technique works, what problems occur, and what factors might influence community involvement and co-creation. Online communities have become more popular recently with the rise in crowdsourcing platforms. These communities concentrate on specific problems and help people with solving and managing these problems. Objectives: We set three main goals to research crowd interaction: (1) find the appropriate characteristics of social crowd utilized for effective software crowdsourcing, (2) highlight the motivation of a crowd for virtual tasks, and (3) evaluate primary participation reasons by assessing various crowds using Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS method. Conclusion: We developed a decision support system to examine the appropriate reasons of crowd participation in crowdsourcing. Rewards and employments were evaluated as the primary motives of crowds for accomplishing tasks on crowdsourcing platforms, knowledge sharing was evaluated as the third reason, ranking was the fourth, competency was the fifth, socialization was sixth, and source of inspiration was the seventh.Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University Researchers Supporting - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Project number (PNURSP2023TR140)

A general purpose conceptual model for crowdsourcing projects

Crowdsourcing is an approach that employs people to process input data to solve a computationally complex problem, such as generating a large dataset of annotated images, audio transcriptions or video scene descriptions. In this approach, people select tasks and produce individual results according to a list of steps that leads to an efficient solution. Then, every single result must be collected, interpreted, and integrated by a platform or system supporting the crowdsourcing process. This MSc dissertation starts with a state-of-the-art discussion, which provides an understanding of the main concepts and relationships reported in crowdsourcing projects found in the literature. By conducting a systematic review of crowdsourcing projects, we understand how these projects are designed and executed in the state-of-the-art, considering the following dimensions: Task execution, quality management, and platform usage. Our results summarized trends of the important aspects of a crowdsourcing project, such as crowd and task types, crowdsourcing platforms, and activities used to manage the quality; we also addressed functions and limitations in traditional crowdsourcing platforms, the definition of a crowdsourcing workflow, and the lack of standardization when designing a crowdsourcing project. In sequence, we developed a detailed conceptual model of crowdsourcing projects, specifying the essential entities and their relationships, based on the concepts leveraged in the accomplished systematic review. This work shows a class diagram that represents a general view of crowdsourcing projects, alongside with the concept of using an activity diagram to describe the execution of a specific project workflow, a neglected concept in previous works. To illustrate our contributions, the conceptual model is applied in some real crowdsourcing projects related to image annotation and segmentation data at scale, image QoE subjective assessments, software development, and cascading crowdsourcing to achieve complex video annotations

A quality approach to real-time smartphone and citizen-driven food market price data: The case of Food Price Crowdsourcing Africa (FPCA) in Nigeria

Timely and reliable monitoring of commodity food prices is an essential requirement for the assessment of market and food security risks and the establishment of early warning systems, especially in developing economies. However, data from regional or national systems for tracking changes of food prices in sub-Saharan Africa lacks the temporal or spatial richness and is often insufficient to inform targeted interventions. In addition to limited opportunity for [near-]real-time assessment of food prices, various stages in the commodity supply chain are mostly unrepresented, thereby limiting insights on stage-related price evolution. Yet, governments and market stakeholders rely on commodity price data to make decisions on appropriate interventions or commodity-focused investments. Recent rapid technological development indicates that digital devices and connectivity services are becoming affordable for many, including in remote areas of developing economies. This offers a great opportunity both for the harvesting of price data (via new data collection methodologies, such as crowdsourcing/crowdsensing — i.e. citizen-generated data — using mobile apps/devices), and for disseminating it (via web dashboards or other means) to provide real-time data that can support decisions at various levels and related policy-making processes. However, market information that aims at improving the functioning of markets and supply chains requires a continuous data flow as well as quality, accessibility and trust. More data does not necessarily translate into better information. Citizen-based data-generation systems are often confronted by challenges related to data quality and citizen participation, which may be further complicated by the volume of data generated compared to traditional approaches. Following the food price hikes during the first noughties of the 21st century, the European Commission's Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO) started collaborating with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) on innovative methodologies for real-time food price data collection and analysis in developing countries. The work carried out so far includes a pilot initiative to crowdsource data from selected markets across several African countries, two workshops (with relevant stakeholders and experts), and the development of a spatial statistical quality methodology to facilitate the best possible exploitation of geo-located data. Based on the latter, the JRC designed the Food Price Crowdsourcing Africa (FPCA) project and implemented it within two states in Northern Nigeria. The FPCA is a credible methodology, based on the voluntary provision of data by a crowd (people living in urban, suburban, and rural areas) using a mobile app, leveraging monetary and non-monetary incentives to enhance contribution, which makes it possible to collect, analyse and validate, and disseminate staple food price data in real time across market segments.JRC.D.4-Economics of Agricultur