Call for Papers
Second International Workshop on UBIQUITOUS CROWDSOURCING
To be held in conjunction with 13th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computin
Beijing, China – September 17-21st, 2011

http://www.personal.psu.edu/u1o/crowdsourcing/

SUMMARY
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With the adoption of mobile, digital and social media networked crowds are reporting and acting upon events in smart environments. Existing platforms for crowdsourcing, support specific activity types, such as micro-tasks on the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; and fall short of facilitating general mechanisms for setting up and maintaining crowd networks easily, flexibly and in a variety of domains.
Building upon First International Workshop on Ubiquitous Crowdsourcing, in this edition we challenge researchers and practitioners to identify requirements for a platform for crowd computing, arising from experiences in deployment crowdsourcing applications, which engage crowd members as sensors, controllers and actuators in smart cities and environments. This workshop will bring together researchers to produce a vision for the universal crowdsourcing platform, documenting it in a theme publication. In addition, accepted workshop papers will be shaped as chapters for a book on “Scientific Foundations of a Crowd Computing Platform” following the workshop.


TOPICS
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Workshop focus is on understanding requirements for supporting crowdsourcing applications in the context of the platform for crowd computing. We are interested in exploring the way the crowdsourcing taxonomy (e.g. task complexity, duration, etc.) drives the requirements for the infrastructure. We encourage both submissions from the industry and academia. Some of the key application domains of interest include disaster management, maintenance and healthcare domains.

The specific topics of interest include:

* Crowds as Sensors. In many scenarios, crowd members report various aspects of the physical world. They take the role of sensors. How do we build systems to capture this role of a crowd, in addition to its participants being actuators and controllers?

* Crowds as Networks. When dealing with situations such as disaster management, we can model geographically co-located people as networks. The emerging field of network science will be useful for answering several interesting questions related to community detection, expertise identification, and routing communication.

* Quality Assurance. How is crowdsourcing going to face the challenges in quality assurance, while providing valuable incentive frameworks that enable honest contributions? An important consideration is the impact of the QA on the cost of the crowdsourcing solution. For example, especially in the low-cost disaster environments when crowdsourcing is introduced to masses of volunteers, one needs to control the cost arising from the quality and trust mechanisms.

* Incentives. Incentives are a key to success or failure of the crowdsourcing activity. How do we differentiate between the incentives for an individual task, in comparison to a group-collaborative activity?

* Security and Privacy. The heterogeneity of wireless network protocols used by the large variety of network connected hardware and software sensors providing crowdsourcing data increases the risk of security compromises. Furthermore, crowdsourcing systems may gather, collate and distribute personal information about individuals. It is essential that users have means for retaining control over the distribution and dissemination of their private information.

SUBMISSIONS
Participants will be selected based on short 4-page papers and 2-page demonstrations around the aforementioned topics of interest. All papers should follow the Ubicomp ACM Word or Latex template. 


E-mail your submissions to maja@us.ibm.com or skumara@psu.edu



IMPORTANT DATES
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• June 18, 2001: Submission deadline
• July 1, 2011: Notification of acceptance
• July 11, 2011: Camera Ready Accepted Papers Due
• Sep 18, 2011: Ubicomp 2011 Workshop Program



Workshop co-chairs
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* Maja Vukovic, IBM Research, TJ Watson, Hawthorne, USA (maja@us.ibm.com) 

* Soundar Kumara, Pennsylvania State University, USA (skumara@psu.edu) 

Confirmed TPC
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Chi Changyan, IBM China Research Lab, China
Giorgos Cheliotis, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Jonathan Corney, University of Strathclyde, UK
Shalini Govil-Pai, Google, USA
Dongwon Lee, Pennsylvania State University,USA
Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, IIIT-Delhi, India
Jonghun Park, Seoul National University, Korea
Wiiliam Regli, Drexel University, USA
Sanjay Sarma, MIT, USA
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State, University, USA
Michael VanPutte, Information Sciences Institute, USA
Petros zerfos, IBM Research, USA
Naveen Sharma, Xerox labs, USA
LiYing Cui, Kimberly-Clark, USA