4,862 research outputs found
Public Participation GIS for sustainable urban mobility planning: methods, applications and challenges
Sustainable mobility planning is a new approach to planning, and as such it requires new methods of public participation, data collection and data aggregation. In the article we present an overview of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) methods with potential use in sustainable urban mobility planning. We present the methods using examples from two recent case studies conducted in Polish cities of Poznań and Łodź. Sustainable urban mobility planning is a cyclical process, and each stage has different data and participatory requirements. Consequently, we situate the PPGIS methods in appropriate stages of planning, based on potential benefits they may bring into the planning process. We discuss key issues related to participant recruitment and provide guidelines for planners interested in implementing methods presented in the paper. The article outlines future research directions stressing the need for systematic case study evaluation
Bandit-Based Task Assignment for Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing
We consider a task assignment problem in crowdsourcing, which is aimed at
collecting as many reliable labels as possible within a limited budget. A
challenge in this scenario is how to cope with the diversity of tasks and the
task-dependent reliability of workers, e.g., a worker may be good at
recognizing the name of sports teams, but not be familiar with cosmetics
brands. We refer to this practical setting as heterogeneous crowdsourcing. In
this paper, we propose a contextual bandit formulation for task assignment in
heterogeneous crowdsourcing, which is able to deal with the
exploration-exploitation trade-off in worker selection. We also theoretically
investigate the regret bounds for the proposed method, and demonstrate its
practical usefulness experimentally
ComQA: A Community-sourced Dataset for Complex Factoid Question Answering with Paraphrase Clusters
To bridge the gap between the capabilities of the state-of-the-art in factoid
question answering (QA) and what users ask, we need large datasets of real user
questions that capture the various question phenomena users are interested in,
and the diverse ways in which these questions are formulated. We introduce
ComQA, a large dataset of real user questions that exhibit different
challenging aspects such as compositionality, temporal reasoning, and
comparisons. ComQA questions come from the WikiAnswers community QA platform,
which typically contains questions that are not satisfactorily answerable by
existing search engine technology. Through a large crowdsourcing effort, we
clean the question dataset, group questions into paraphrase clusters, and
annotate clusters with their answers. ComQA contains 11,214 questions grouped
into 4,834 paraphrase clusters. We detail the process of constructing ComQA,
including the measures taken to ensure its high quality while making effective
use of crowdsourcing. We also present an extensive analysis of the dataset and
the results achieved by state-of-the-art systems on ComQA, demonstrating that
our dataset can be a driver of future research on QA.Comment: 11 pages, NAACL 201
XTribe: a web-based social computation platform
In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an
infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the
cognitive abilities of human agents in on-line communities so to steer the
collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also
triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run
experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human
beings is crucially required for research purposes. Nowadays, while the number
of on-line users has been steadily growing, there is still a need of
systematization in the approach to the web as a laboratory. In this paper we
present Experimental Tribe (XTribe in short), a novel general purpose web-based
platform for web-gaming and social computation. Ready to use and already
operational, XTribe aims at drastically reducing the effort required to develop
and run web experiments. XTribe has been designed to speed up the
implementation of those general aspects of web experiments that are independent
of the specific experiment content. For example, XTribe takes care of user
management by handling their registration and profiles and in case of
multi-player games, it provides the necessary user grouping functionalities.
XTribe also provides communication facilities to easily achieve both
bidirectional and asynchronous communication. From a practical point of view,
researchers are left with the only task of designing and implementing the game
interface and logic of their experiment, on which they maintain full control.
Moreover, XTribe acts as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus
realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users' curiosity, enhances their
participation, and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 2013 Third International Conference on
Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), Sept. 30 2013-Oct. 2 2013, Karlsruhe,
German
Estimating snow cover from publicly available images
In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous
regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We
argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated
photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as
additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and
airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and
processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific
challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks,
filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying
illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index,
which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of
visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a
manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area
estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show
that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover
index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi
The Future of Science Governance: A review of public concerns, governance and institutional response
Weaving risk identification into crowdsourcing lifecycle
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Crowdsourcing enables companies and individuals as well to tap into the versatile knowledge, creativity, and talent of a large population of crowd contributors. Yet, crowdsourcing can expose companies to a myriad of risks that can have drastic impact on the profitability and competitive position. This paper presents a Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS) of crowdsourcing projects that spans the entire project\u27s lifecycle. The paper first reports on a lifecycle model that captures the main phases of a crowdsourcing project. It then identifies the risk factors associated with each phase of the crowdsourcing lifecycle and discusses the impact of these identified risk factors on the crowdsourcing company. The proposed RBS calls for the need to pay close attention to risk monitoring during each phase of the crowdsourcing lifecycle
Beyond data collection: Objectives and methods of research using VGI and geo-social media for disaster management
This paper investigates research using VGI and geo-social media in the disaster management
context. Relying on the method of systematic mapping, it develops a classification schema that
captures three levels of main category, focus, and intended use, and analyzes the relationships
with the employed data sources and analysis methods. It focuses the scope to the pioneering
field of disaster management, but the described approach and the developed classification
schema are easily adaptable to different application domains or future developments. The
results show that a hypothesized consolidation of research, characterized through the building
of canonical bodies of knowledge and advanced application cases with refined methodology,
has not yet happened. The majority of the studies investigate the challenges and potential
solutions of data handling, with fewer studies focusing on socio-technological issues or
advanced applications. This trend is currently showing no sign of change, highlighting that VGI
research is still very much technology-driven as opposed to theory- or application-driven. From
the results of the systematic mapping study, the authors formulate and discuss several
research objectives for future work, which could lead to a stronger, more theory-driven
treatment of the topic VGI in GIScience.Carlos Granell has been partly funded by the Ramón y Cajal Programme (grant number RYC-2014-16913
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