Evaluating Trust-Based Fusion Models for Participatory Sensing Applications

Participatory sensing is a specialized form of crowdsourcing for mobile devices in which the users act as sensors to report on local environmental conditions, such as traffic, pollution, and wireless signal strength. This computing framework has great promise as a tool for urban planners, but deploying new applications is a challenge since the overall performance can be sensitive to the specific user population. This paper describes the process of prototyping a mobile phone crowdsourcing app for monitoring parking availability on a large university campus.