The 5th IEEE PerCom International Workshop on Crowd Assisted Sensing, Pervasive Systems and Communications(CASPer 2018)

With smart-phones in their pockets, more than 1 billion people now have access to sensing, computation, and connectivity, making it possible to harness the power of the crowd to collect and share data about their surroundings and experiences on a massive scale. Crowdsensing/crowdsourcing is a novel data collection paradigm that leverages this vast mobile sensor network, making it possible to expand the scope of research endeavors and address civic issues without requiring the purchase of specialized sensors or the installation and maintenance of network infrastructure. Data collected using such applications may come from unexpected yet interesting and valuable sources and may allow for collecting data in previously inaccessible locations and contexts.

This new data collection paradigm introduces several research challenges. Privacy is a primary concern for users who contribute sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII). Incentive mechanisms for participation may be needed to encourage people to volunteer their resources to collect data. Methods are needed for processing large-scale, user-generated data sets into meaningful information, and for assessing and understanding the quality of information to help guide decision-making. Approaches which involve the crowd in such data analysis tasks, with humans serving as a source of semantic information, interpretation, and evaluation of crowdsensing/crowdsourcing data, can also help to build an understanding of the physical, computational, and socio-technical environment.

The objective of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion, debate, and collaboration focused on ideas, trends, techniques, and recent advances in crowdsensing and crowdsourcing. Similarly to our earlier workshops, CASPer 2018 will also feature an invited speech and a panel discussion devoted to the latest key developments in the crowdsensing and crowdsourcing domain.

We invite original research contributions that advance the state-of-the-art as well as position papers which pose a new direction or present a controversial point of view.