CSWA: Aggregation-Free Spatial-Temporal Community Sensing

In this paper, we present a novel community sensing paradigm -- {C}ommunity {S}ensing {W}ithout {A}ggregation}. CSWA is designed to obtain the environment information (e.g., air pollution or temperature) in each subarea of the target area, without aggregating sensor and location data collected by community members. CSWA operates on top of a secured peer-to-peer network over the community members and proposes a novel \emph{Decentralized Spatial-Temporal Compressive Sensing} framework based on \emph{Parallelized Stochastic Gradient Descent}. Through learning the \emph{low-rank structure} via distributed optimization, CSWA approximates the value of the sensor data in each subarea (both covered and uncovered) for each sensing cycle using the sensor data locally stored in each member's mobile device. Simulation experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate that CSWA exhibits low approximation error (i.e., less than $0.2 ^\circ$C in city-wide temperature sensing task and $10$ units of PM2.5 index in urban air pollution sensing) and performs comparably to (sometimes better than) state-of-the-art algorithms based on the data aggregation and centralized computation.Comment: This paper has been accepted by AAAI 2018. First two authors are equally contribute

Social life and political trust in China: Searching for machers and schmoozers

Previous literature has provided little evidence regarding the ways in which China’s burgeoning social life and rapid urbanization shape Chinese people’s level of trust in their government leaders. This article builds on Robert Putnam’s conceptualization of maching and schmoozing as formal and informal forms of social involvement, respectively. Using the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey, we identify four types of participants in social involvement, namely the inactives, machers, schmoozers and all-rounders, to untangle various aspects of social life in China. Our empirical analysis shows that the sociodemographic positions of the four types of social involvement are largely distinct. Our findings also contribute to the study of political trust by offering insight into the complicated associations between social involvement, hukou status and political trust in contemporary Chinese society

EdgeSense: Edge-Mediated Spatial-Temporal Crowdsensing

Edge computing recently is increasingly popular due to the growth of data size and the need of sensing with the reduced center. Based on Edge computing architecture, we propose a novel crowdsensing framework called Edge-Mediated Spatial-Temporal Crowdsensing. This algorithm targets on receiving the environment information such as air pollution, temperature, and traffic flow in some parts of the goal area, and does not aggregate sensor data with its location information. Specifically, EdgeSense works on top of a secured peer-To-peer network consisted of participants and propose a novel Decentralized Spatial-Temporal Crowdsensing framework based on Parallelized Stochastic Gradient Descent. To approximate the sensing data in each part of the target area in each sensing cycle, EdgeSense uses the local sensor data in participants\u27 mobile devices to learn the low-rank characteristic and then recovers the sensing data from it. We evaluate the EdgeSense on the real-world data sets (temperature [1] and PM2.5 [2] data sets), where our algorithm can achieve low error in approximation and also can compete with the baseline algorithm which is designed using centralized and aggregated mechanism

Embracing the Market: Entry into Self-Employment in Transitional China, 1978-1996

This paper introduces labor market transition as an intervening process by which the macro institutional transition to a market economy alters social stratification outcome. Rather than directly addressing income distribution, it examines the pattern of workers’ entry into self-employment in reform-era China (1978-1996), focusing on rural-urban differences and the temporal trend. Analyses of data from a national representative survey in China show that education, party membership and cadre status all deter urban workers’ entry into self-employment, while education promotes rural workers’ entry into self-employment. As marketization proceeds, the rate of entry into self-employment increases in both rural and urban China, but urban workers are increasingly more likely to take advantages of the new market opportunities. In urban China, college graduates and cadres are still less likely to be involved in self-employment, but they are becoming more likely to do so in the later phase of reform. The diversity of transition scenarios is attributed to rural-urban differences in labor market structures.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39897/3/wp512.pd