With spatial crowdsourcing (SC), requesters outsource their spatiotemporal tasks (tasks associated with location and time) to a set of workers, who will perform the tasks by physically traveling to the tasks' locations. However, current solutions require the locations of the workers and/or the tasks to be disclosed to untrusted parties (SC server) for effective assignments of tasks to workers. In this paper we propose a framework for assigning tasks to workers in an online manner without compromising the location privacy of workers and tasks. We perturb the locations of both tasks and workers based on geo-indistinguishability and then devise techniques to quantify the probability of reachability between a task and a worker, given their perturbed locations. We investigate both analytical and empirical models for quantifying the worker-task pair reachability and propose task assignment strategies that strike a balance among various metrics such as the number of completed tasks, worker travel distance and system overhead. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our proposed techniques result in minimal disclosure of task locations and no disclosure of worker locations without significantly sacrificing the total number of assigned tasks.

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a novel platform that engages individuals in the act of collecting various types of spatial data. This method of data collection can significantly reduce cost and turnover time and is particularly useful in urban environmental sensing, where traditional means fail to provide fine-grained field data. In this study, we introduce hyperlocal spatial crowdsourcing, where all workers who are located within the spatiotemporal vicinity of a task are eligible to perform the task (e.g., reporting the precipitation level at their area and time). In this setting, there is often a budget constraint, either for every time period or for the entire campaign, on the number of workers to activate to perform tasks. The challenge is thus to maximize the number of assigned tasks under the budget constraint despite the dynamic arrivals of workers and tasks. We introduce a taxonomy of several problem variants, such as budget-per-time-period vs. budget-per-campaign and binary-utility vs. distance-based-utility . We study the hardness of the task assignment problem in the offline setting and propose online heuristics which exploit the spatial and temporal knowledge acquired over time. Our experiments are conducted with spatial crowdsourcing workloads generated by the SCAWG tool, and extensive results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed solutions.

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a transformative platform that engages individuals in collecting and analyzing environmental, social, and other spatio-temporal information. SC outsources spatio-temporal tasks to a set of workers, i.e., individuals with mobile devices that perform the tasks by physically traveling to specified locations. However, current solutions require the workers to disclose their locations to untrusted parties. In this paper, we introduce a framework for protecting location privacy of workers participating in SC tasks. We propose a mechanism based on differential privacy and geocasting that achieves effective SC services while offering privacy guarantees to workers. We address scenarios with both static and dynamic (i.e., moving) datasets of workers. Experimental results on real-world data show that the proposed technique protects location privacy without incurring significant performance overhead.

Location entropy (LE) is a popular metric for measuring the popularity of various locations (e.g., points-of-interest). Unlike other metrics computed from only the number of (unique) visits to a location, namely frequency, LE also captures the diversity of the users' visits, and is thus more accurate than other metrics. Current solutions for computing LE require full access to the past visits of users to locations, which poses privacy threats. This paper discusses, for the first time, the problem of perturbing location entropy for a set of locations according to differential privacy. The problem is challenging because removing a single user from the dataset will impact multiple records of the database; i.e., all the visits made by that user to various locations. Towards this end, we first derive non-trivial, tight bounds for both local and global sensitivity of LE, and show that to satisfy ε-differential privacy, a large amount of noise must be introduced, rendering the published results useless. Hence, we propose a thresholding technique to limit the number of users' visits, which significantly reduces the perturbation error but introduces an approximation error. To achieve better utility, we extend the technique by adopting two weaker notions of privacy: smooth sensitivity (slightly weaker) and crowd-blending (strictly weaker). Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our proposed techniques preserve original data distribution without compromising location privacy.

When analyzing and processing videos, it has become increasingly important in many applications to also consider contextual information, in addition to the content. With the ubiquity of sensor-rich smartphones, acquiring a continuous stream of geo-spatial metadata that includes the location and orientation of a camera together with the video frames has become practical. However, no such detailed dataset is publicly available. In this paper we present an extensive geo-tagged video dataset named GeoUGV that has been collected as part of the MediaQ [3] and GeoVid [1] projects. The key features of the dataset are that each video file is accompanied by a metadata sequence of geo-tags consisting of GPS locations, compass directions, and spatial keywords at fine-grained intervals. The GeoUGV dataset has been collected by volunteer users and its statistics can be summarized as follows: 2,397 videos containing 208,976 video frames that are geo-tagged, collected by 289 users in more than 20 cities across the world over a period of 10 years (2007-2016). We hope that this dataset will be useful for researchers, scientists and practitioners alike in their work.

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a novel platform that engages individuals in the act of collecting various types of spatial data. This method of data collection can significantly reduce cost and turnover time, and is particularly useful in environmental sensing, where traditional means fail to provide fine-grained field data. In this study, we introduce hyperlocal spatial crowdsourcing, where all workers who are located within the spatiotemporal vicinity of a task are eligible to perform the task, e.g., reporting the precipitation level at their area and time. In this setting, there is often a budget constraint, either for every time period or for the entire campaign, on the number of workers to activate to perform tasks. The challenge is thus to maximize the number of assigned tasks under the budget constraint, despite the dynamic arrivals of workers and tasks as well as their co-location relationship. We study two problem variants in this paper: budget is constrained for every timestamp, i.e. fixed, and budget is constrained for the entire campaign, i.e. dynamic. For each variant, we study the complexity of its offline version and then propose several heuristics for the online version which exploit the spatial and temporal knowledge acquired over time. Extensive experiments with real-world and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed solutions.

Efficient and thorough data collection and its timely analysis are critical for disaster response and recovery in order to save peoples lives during disasters. However, access to comprehensive data in disaster areas and their quick analysis to transform the data to actionable knowledge are challenging. With the popularity and pervasiveness of mobile devices, crowdsourcing data collection and analysis has emerged as an effective and scalable solution. This paper addresses the problem of crowdsourcing mobile videos for disasters by identifying two unique challenges of 1) prioritizing visualdata collection and transmission under bandwidth scarcity caused by damaged communication networks and 2) analyzing the acquired data in a timely manner. We introduce a new crowdsourcing framework for acquiring and analyzing the mobile videos utilizing fine granularity spatial metadata of videos for a rapidly changing disaster situation. We also develop an analytical model to quantify the visual awareness of a video based on its metadata and propose the visual awareness maximization problem for acquiring the most relevant data under bandwidth constraints. The collected videos are evenly distributed to off-site analysts to collectively minimize crowdsourcing efforts for analysis. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed framework.

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a novel and transformative platform that engages individuals, groups and communities in the act of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating environmental, social and other spatio-temporal information. SC outsources a set of spatio-temporal tasks to a set of workers, i.e., individuals with mobile devices that perform the tasks by physically traveling to specified locations of interest. Protecting location privacy is an important concern in SC, as an adversary with access to individual whereabouts can infer sensitive details about a person (e.g., health status, political views). Due to the challenging nature of protecting worker privacy in SC, solutions for this problem are quite complex, and require tuning of several parameters to obtain satisfactory results. In this paper, we propose PrivGeoCrowd, a toolbox for interactive visualization and tuning of SC private task assignment methods. This toolbox is useful for several real-world entities that are involved in SC, such as: mobile phone operators that want to sanitize datasets with worker locations, spatial task requesters, and SC-service providers that match workers to tasks.

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a transformative platform that engages individuals, groups and communities in the act of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating environmental, social and other spatio-temporal information. The objective of SC is to outsource a set of spatio-temporal tasks to a set of workers , i.e., individuals with mobile devices that perform the tasks by physically traveling to specified locations of interest. However, current solutions require the workers, who in many cases are simply volunteering for a cause, to disclose their locations to untrustworthy entities. In this paper, we introduce a framework for protecting location privacy of workers participating in SC tasks. We argue that existing location privacy techniques are not sufficient for SC, and we propose a mechanism based on differential privacy and geocasting that achieves effective SC services while offering privacy guarantees to workers. We investigate analytical models and task assignment strategies that balance multiple crucial aspects of SC functionality, such as task completion rate, worker travel distance and system overhead. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show that the proposed technique protects workers' location privacy without incurring significant performance metrics penalties.

Histograms have been extensively used for selectivity estimation by academics and have successfully been adopted by database industry. However, the estimation error is usually large for skewed distributions and biased attributes, which are typical in real-world data. Therefore, we propose effective models to quantitatively measure bias and selectivity based on information entropy. These models together with the principles of maximum entropy are then used to develop a class of entropy-based histograms. Moreover, since entropy can be computed incrementally, we present the incremental variations of our algorithms that reduce the complexities of the histogram construction from quadratic to linear. We conducted an extensive set of experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets to compare the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed techniques with many other histogram-based techniques, showing the superiority of the entropy-based approaches for both equality and range queries.

Spatial crowdsourcing has gained emerging interest from both research communities and industries. Most of current spatial crowdsourcing frameworks assume independent and atomic tasks. However, there could be some cases that one needs to crowdsource a spatial complex task which consists of some spatial sub-tasks (i.e., tasks related to a specific location). The spatial complex task's assignment requires assignments of all of its sub-tasks. The currently available frameworks are inapplicable to such kind of tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to crowdsource spatial complex tasks. We first formally define the Maximum Complex Task Assignment (MCTA) problem and propose alternative solutions. Subsequently, we perform various experiments using both real and synthetic datasets to investigate and verify the usability of our proposed approach.