When crowdsourcing meets mobile sensing: a social network perspective

Mobile sensing is an emerging technology that utilizes agent-participatory data for decision making or state estimation, including multimedia applications. This article investigates the structure of mobile sensing schemes and introduces crowdsourcing methods for mobile sensing. Inspired by social networks, one can establish trust among participatory agents to leverage the wisdom of crowds for mobile sensing. A prototype of social-network-inspired mobile multimedia and sensing application is presented for illustrative purposes. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets show improved performance of mobile sensing via crowdsourcing. Challenges for mobile sensing with respect to Internet layers are discussed.