Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Multimodal crowd sensing

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 1st International Workshop on Multimodal Crowd Sensing -- CrowdSens 2012, held at CIKM 2021 in Maui, Hawaii, USA, on November 2nd, 2012. The ubiquitous availability of computing technology, in particular smartphones, tablets, laptops and other easily portable devices, and the adoption of social networking sites, makes it possible to be connected and continuously contribute to a massively distributed information publishing process. By doing so, users are (unconsciously) acting as social sensors, whose sensor readings are their manually generated data. People document their daily life experiences, report on their physical locations and social interactions with others, express opinions and provide diverse observations on both the physical world (sights, sounds, smells, feelings, etc.) and the online world (news, music, events, etc.). Such massive amounts of ubiquitous social sensors, if wisely utilized, can provide new forms of valuable information that are currently not available by any traditional data collection methods including real physical sensors, and can be used to enhance decision making processes. The main goal of the 1st International Workshop on Multimodal Crowd Sensing (CrowdSens 2012) was to provide an open forum for researchers from various fields such as Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, User Modeling and Personalization, Stream Processing, and Sensor Networks, for addressing the challenges of effectively mining, analyzing, fusing, and exploiting information from multimodal physical and social sensor data sources. Many factors are included into the complexity of the problem, such as the real-time requirements of the data processing; the heterogeneity of the data sources, from physical sensors data to posts on social media; and the ubiquitous and noisy nature of the human-sensor generated information, which can be written in an informal style, and can be redundant, incomplete, or even incorrect. The workshop thus aimed to stimulate discussions about how the knowledge embedded in human sensor data can be collected, extracted, modeled, analyzed, integrated, summarized, and finally exploited. The workshop consisted of: keynote talks by Ido Guy (IBM Research - Haifa, Israel) and Manuel Cebrián (University of California, San Diego, California, USA),three research talks and two posters, selected by the program committee from a total of nine submissions, with topics spanning from crowdsourcing modelling to event detection in the Social Media, andan open panel for discussing advances and open issues on management and exploitation of knowledge embedded in human sensor data, serving as an open stage for interdisciplinary collaboration for facing the emerging research challenges.