Privacy in crowdsourcing:a systematic review

The advent of crowdsourcing has brought with it multiple privacy challenges. For example, essential monitoring activities, while necessary and unavoidable, also potentially compromise contributor privacy. We conducted an extensive literature review of the research related to the privacy aspects of crowdsourcing. Our investigation revealed interesting gender differences and also differences in terms of individual perceptions. We conclude by suggesting a number of future research directions.</p

Just-in-Time Memoryless Trust for Crowdsourced IoT Services

We propose just-in-time memoryless trust for crowdsourced IoT services. We leverage the characteristics of the IoT service environment to evaluate their trustworthiness. A novel framework is devised to assess a service's trust without relying on previous knowledge, i.e., memoryless trust. The framework exploits service-session-related data to offer a trust value valid only during the current session, i.e., just-in-time trust. Several experiments are conducted to assess the efficiency of the proposed framework.Comment: 8 pages, Accepted and to appear in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS). Content may change prior to final publicatio

Fighting Authorship Linkability with Crowdsourcing

Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature, blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as product or service reviews, is an important and increasingly popular type of content that is being used as a foundation of many trendy community-based reviewing sites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. Some recent results have shown that, due partly to their specialized/topical nature, sets of reviews authored by the same person are readily linkable based on simple stylometric features. In practice, this means that individuals who author more than a few reviews under different accounts (whether within one site or across multiple sites) can be linked, which represents a significant loss of privacy. In this paper, we start by showing that the problem is actually worse than previously believed. We then explore ways to mitigate authorship linkability in community-based reviewing. We first attempt to harness the global power of crowdsourcing by engaging random strangers into the process of re-writing reviews. As our empirical results (obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk) clearly demonstrate, crowdsourcing yields impressively sensible reviews that reflect sufficiently different stylometric characteristics such that prior stylometric linkability techniques become largely ineffective. We also consider using machine translation to automatically re-write reviews. Contrary to what was previously believed, our results show that translation decreases authorship linkability as the number of intermediate languages grows. Finally, we explore the combination of crowdsourcing and machine translation and report on the results

New quality of financial institutions and business management

Economic processes in the world are characterized by a high level of dynamism, change and innovative approaches to addressing key issues in nowadays. In a context of globalization and European integration of Ukraine into a high-tech competitive environment in order to financing innovative projects, it is necessary to use Blockchain technology as an effective tool for digital economy. Purpose of scientific research is to find out key priorities and functionalities of Blockchain’s application for solving business and government tasks. The object of scientific research is the latest financial technology Blockchain and a system of cult-technologies: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdinvesting. Methodology. In the process of re-search, the following methods are used: generalization – in studying the nature, pre-conditions and principles of Blockchain technologies; formalization – when compar-ing characteristics of the latest forms of financing, such as crowdsourcing, crowd-funding, crowdinvesting. In the course of scientific research, key qualitative charac-teristics of digital economy are described and the dominant components of its devel-opment are investigated. The result of the article. The priorities, new principles of business management and possibilities of Blockchain technology as an effective digi-tal economy tool for solving business and government tasks are revealed. Future pro-spects from the implementation of crowd-technologies as an effective management tool in progress for solving the problems of innovative business are substantiated. Interconnection in the latest financial institution of creative initiatives realization is presented. The comparative analysis of management of new institutes of innovative development for Ukrainian economy in the course of doing business is carried out. The result of the research is presentation of the relationship in the latest financial in-stitution implementing creative initiatives and a comparative analysis of new insti-tutes of innovative development in the sphere of finance for the Ukrainian economy. Practical implications. The components of digital economy identified by the authors in the article are accelerators of the socio-economic life of Ukrainian society in the modern world and are capable of rapidly increasing Ukraine’s GDP. The described new forms of financing of Ukrainian start-ups (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing) are today quite interesting and effective tool for solving business problems in the financial, economic, innovative, marketing and marketing spheres. Value/originality. Blockchain technology, as an effective tool for Ukraine’s digital economy, is able to address the challenges of business and government, uncover the relationship between crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and explain the content of innovative financial institutions for Ukraine’s economy

The Dark Side of Micro-Task Marketplaces: Characterizing Fiverr and Automatically Detecting Crowdturfing

As human computation on crowdsourcing systems has become popular and powerful for performing tasks, malicious users have started misusing these systems by posting malicious tasks, propagating manipulated contents, and targeting popular web services such as online social networks and search engines. Recently, these malicious users moved to Fiverr, a fast-growing micro-task marketplace, where workers can post crowdturfing tasks (i.e., astroturfing campaigns run by crowd workers) and malicious customers can purchase those tasks for only $5. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Fiverr. First, we identify the most popular types of crowdturfing tasks found in this marketplace and conduct case studies for these crowdturfing tasks. Then, we build crowdturfing task detection classifiers to filter these tasks and prevent them from becoming active in the marketplace. Our experimental results show that the proposed classification approach effectively detects crowdturfing tasks, achieving 97.35% accuracy. Finally, we analyze the real world impact of crowdturfing tasks by purchasing active Fiverr tasks and quantifying their impact on a target site. As part of this analysis, we show that current security systems inadequately detect crowdsourced manipulation, which confirms the necessity of our proposed crowdturfing task detection approach

Resilient seed systems for climate change adaptation and sustainable livelihoods in the East Africa sub-region: Report of training workshop, Addis Ababa Ethiopia, 17-21 September 2019

Bioversity International is implementing a Dutch-supported project entitled: Resilient seed systems for climate change adaptation and sustainable livelihoods in the East Africa sub-region. This work aims to boost timely and affordable access to good-quality seed for a portfolio of crops / varieties for millions of women and men farmers’ and their communities across east Africa. A first project training: i) contextualized farmer varietal selection, ii) provided practical demonstrations of tools for climate-change analysis, iii) introduced policy issues associated with managing crop diversity, iv) outlined characterization and evaluation of genetic resources, and v) articulated associated gender issues, and issues related to disseminating elite materials. The training concluded with a contextualizing field trip. In the workshop evaluation, 98% participants declared their overall satisfaction level to be high (74%) or medium (24%), indicating the training furnished them with good ideas for networking and using the tools and methods they learned about