Towards mobile sensor-aware crowdsourcing: Architecture, opportunities and challenges

Abstract

The recent success of general purpose crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk paved the way for a plethora of crowd-enabled applications and workflows. However, the variety of tasks which can be approached via such crowdsourcing platforms is limited by constraints of the web-based interface. In this paper, we propose mobile user interface clients. Switching to mobile clients has the potential to radically change the way crowdsourcing is performed, and allows for a new breed of crowdsourcing tasks. Here, especially the ability to tap into the wealth of precision sensors embedded in modern mobile hardware is a game changer. In this paper, we will discuss opportunities and challenges resulting from such a platform, and discuss a reference architecture. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.