CASPer 2019: The 6th Workshop on Crowd Assisted Sensing, Pervasive Systems and Communications

With smartphones in their pockets, well over 2 billion people now have immediate access to sensing, computation, and connectivity, and this makes 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 data collection paradigm that leverages this vast mobile sensor network, expanding the scope of research endeavours and allowing civic issues to be addressed, without the need to purchase specialized sensors or install and maintain network infrastructure. Data collected using such applications may come from unexpected yet interesting and valuable sources, supporting sensing in previously inaccessible locations and contexts.

This new data collection paradigm introduces several research challenges. Privacy is a primary concern for users that are contributing sensitive or identifying data. 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 that involve the crowd in such data analysis tasks, with humans serving as a source of semantic information for, or interpreting and evaluating crowdsensed/crowdsourced data, can also help to build an understanding of the physical, computational, and socio-technical environment.

In response to the growing interest in this area of research, we are pleased to introduce the Sixth International Workshop on Crowd Assisted Sensing, Pervasive Systems and Communications (CASPer), held in conjunction with PerCom 2019. The objective of CASPer is to provide a forum for discussion, debate, and collaboration focused on emerging ideas, trends, and recent advances in crowdsensing/crowdsourcing. This year's workshop includes a keynote, 3 papers and a Q&A session.

This workshop would not be possible without the contributions of many colleagues. We would like to extend our thanks to the members of the Technical Program Committee who shared their expertise and insight, providing thoughtful and timely paper reviews. We also would like to thank the authors who selected this workshop as the venue for sharing their ideas and the attendees for their contributions to the discussion of important topics in crowdsensing/crowdsourcing.

Welcome to CASPer 2019!

Thomas Silverston, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan Yu Wang, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA CASPer 2019 General Chairs

Imre Lendák, University of Novi Sad, Serbia Luke Dickens, University College London, UK CASPer 2019 Programme Chairs

Technical Program Committee