Governments have begun to view AI compute infrastructures, including advanced AI chips, as a geostrategic resource. This is partly because “compute governance” is believed to be emerging as an important tool for governing AI systems. In this governance model, states that host AI compute capacity within their territorial jurisdictions are likely to be better placed to impose their rules on AI systems than states that do not. In this study, we provide the first attempt at mapping the global geography of public cloud GPU compute, one particularly important category of AI compute infrastructure. Using a census of hyperscale cloud providers’ cloud regions, we observe that the world is divided into “Compute North” countries that host AI compute relevant for AI development (ie. training), “Compute South” countries whose AI compute is more relevant for AI deployment (ie. running inferencing), and “Compute Desert” countries that host no public cloud AI compute at all. We generate potential explanations for the results using expert interviews, discuss the implications to AI governance and technology geopolitics, and consider possible future trajectories.

Research is increasingly highlighting the potential for situated crowdsourcing to overcome some crucial limitations of online crowdsourcing. However, it remains unclear whether a situated crowdsourcing market can be sustained, and whether worker supply responds to price-setting in such a market. Our work is the first to systematically investigate workers' behaviour and response to economic incentives in a situated crowdsourcing market. We show that the market-based model is a sustainable approach to recruiting workers and obtaining situated crowdsourcing contributions. We also show that the price mechanism is a very effective tool for adjusting the supply of labour in a situated crowdsourcing market. Our work advances the body of work investigating situated crowdsourcing.

In this paper we present a on-field study for evaluating a crowd sourcing mobile social search application. With the help of the local crowd via social medias, this application assists foreign visitors in Japan by answering their image-based questions at hand in a timely fashion. We ran a controlled field experiment for 6 weeks with 55 participants. We found that the mobile crowd sourcing model demonstrated a reliable performance on response speed and response quantity: half of the requests were answered within 10 minutes, 75% of requests were answered within 30 minutes, and on average every request had 4.2 answers. Especially in the afternoon, evening and night, nearly 88% requests were answered in average approximately 10 minutes, with more than 4 answers per request. In terms of participation motivation, we found the top active crowd workers were more driven by intrinsic motivations rather than any of the extrinsic incentives (gamification incentives and social incentives) we designed.

Travelers in countries that use an unfamiliar script cannot use pocket translators or online translation services to understand menus, maps, signs and other important information, because they are unable to write the text they see. Solutions based on optical character recognition provide very limited performance in real-world situations and for complex scripts such as Chinese and Japanese. In this paper, we propose an alternative image translation solution based on crowdsourcing. A large number of human workers on mobile terminals are used to carry out the tasks of image recognition, translation and quality assurance. Compared to purely technical solutions, this human computation approach is also able to account for context and non-textual cues, and provide higher level information to the end-user. In this paper, we describe a preliminary user study to create a model of end-user requirements.

Economic incentives are a powerful way of shaping consumer behavior towards more commercially efficient and environmentally sustainable patterns. In this paper, we explore the idea of combining pervasive computing techniques with electronic payment systems to create activity-based micro-incentives. Users who consume additional resources by e.g., occupying an air-conditioned space instead of a normal space are levied additional micro-payments. In an alternative approach, consumers who choose to save resources are rewarded with micro-rebates off the price of a service. As a result, the cost of using a service corresponds more closely with the resources used, leading market mechanisms to allocate resources efficiently. A key challenge is designing incentive mechanisms that alter consumer behavior in the desired fashion. We introduce four incentive models, and present evaluation results suggesting that consumers make different decisions depending on which model is used.

This paper presents EcoIsland, which is a system persuading individuals and families to change their lifestyle patterns to reduce CO2 emissions. EcoIsland visualizes the user's current eco-friendly behavior as an island shared by his/her family members. Several persuasive techniques developed in behaviorism, social psychology, and economy are used to offer incentives to him/her to encourage eco-friendly behavior. We examine and compare the implementation and effectiveness of different types of persuasive techniques in several user studies.

Ambient lifestyle feedback systems are embedded computer systems designed to motivate changes in a person's lifestyle by reflecting an interpretation of targeted behavior back to the person. Other interactive systems including serious games have been applied for the same purpose in areas such as nutrition, health and energy conservation, but they suffer from drawbacks such as inaccurate self-reporting, burdens placed on the user, and lack of effective feedback. Ambient lifestyle feedback systems overcome these challenges by relying on passive observation, calm presentation style and emotionally engaging feedback content. In this paper, we present an ambient lifestyle feedback system concept and provide insights from the design and implementation of two prototype systems, Virtual Aquarium and Mona Lisa Bookshelf. In particular, we discuss the theory and practice of effective feedback design by drawing on elementary behavioral psychology and small-scale user studies. The work is aimed at aiding in the design of ambient persuasive technologies and ambient interaction in general.

In this paper, we propose a novel computer gaming style Lifestyle Ubiquitous Gaming, where our experience is enriched in our daily lives by using gaming concepts. In lifestyle ubiquitous gaming, human daily activities are implicitly tracked and interpreted. Then, the feedback of the activities are returned to a user as a game system' presentation. The user can enjoy the game without too much conscious. This characteristic has a very big difference from traditional gaming. We describe the motivation and conceptual framework of lifestyle ubiquitous gaming, and show two case studies that we have conducted to demonstrate our proposal's feasibility and effectiveness.