Social Sensing: Building Reliable Systems on Unreliable Data

Increasingly, human beings are sensors engaging directly with the mobile Internet. Individuals can now share real-time experiences at an unprecedented scale. Social Sensing: Building Reliable Systems on Unreliable Data looks at recent advances in the emerging field of social sensing, emphasizing the key problem faced by application designers: how to extract reliable information from data collected from largely unknown and possibly unreliable sources. The book explains how a myriad of societal applications can be derived from this massive amount of data collected and shared by average individuals. The title offers theoretical foundations to support emerging data-driven cyber-physical applications and touches on key issues such as privacy. The authors present solutions based on recent research and novel ideas that leverage techniques from cyber-physical systems, sensor networks, machine learning, data mining, and information fusion. • Offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective bridging social networks, big data, cyber-physical systems, and reliability • Presents novel theoretical foundations for assured social sensing and modeling humans as sensors • Includes case studies and application examples based on real data sets • Supplemental material includes sample datasets and fact-finding software that implements the main algorithms described in the book.