Crowdsourcing: A building block for smart cities

• Main Author: MISRA, Archan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Public utilities; Ubiquitous computing; Building blocks; Crowdsourcing platforms; Mobile crowdsourcing; Municipal services; Participatory Sensing; Pickup and delivery; Urban logistics; Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3571; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4572/viewcontent/Crowdsourcing_smart_cities_2016_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This talk will present a vision, and real-world examples, of the use of mobile crowdsourcing for building a variety of smart-city applications and services. I will first describe the paradigm of centrally-coordinated crowdsourcing, where the crowdsourcing platform intelligently recommends different tasks to different candidate workers, and contrast it with today's prevalent paradigm, where workers select and perform tasks in an uncoordinated, opportunistic fashion. I will then describe real-world examples of such crowdsourcing (and participatory sensing) for two applications: (a) smart campus monitoring and (b) last-mile urban logistics (package pickup and delivery). The talk will also describe the opportunities and open challenges involved in making such crowdsourcing an organic part of real-time municipal services monitoring and delivery.