Human factors in crowd-assisted sensing

The paradigm of crowd-assisted sensing primarily relies on volunteers, who use their personal devices to collect sensor information. To foster participants' contributions and hence ensure the viability of the underlying applications, different approaches, such as novel incentive schemes and privacy-preserving mechanisms, have been proposed. In most cases, these approaches have been evaluated by means of simulations and proof-of-concept implementations. While these evaluations are necessary to measure the efficacy and performance of the introduced solutions, they often neglect the human factors, despite their central role in crowd assisted applications. In my keynote, I will therefore emphasize on these aspects by presenting different studies, which my research team and I have conducted in the last years. Covered challenges range from the exploration of attitudes to participatory sensing tasks in location-based gaming communities to the participants' expectation in terms of rewards based on the invested resources. Our studies share common goals including analyzing the requirements from the perspective of potential users, which may contribute to their acceptance of novel solutions as well as motivate them to engage in crowd-assisted sensing applications in both short- and long-term.