MobileMiner is an app developed by young coders to record the behavior of other apps on Android smartphones. They used the app to collect their own mobile data and discussed their attitudes towards privacy before and after seeing what was collected. OpenCellID crowdsources locations of cell towers for location services. NervousNet is a mobile app from ETH Zurich that polls physical sensors on a device and sends the data to remote proxies where it is combined into virtual sensors. Crowd sourcing can be used to train machine learning models to disambiguate brands in YouTube videos by having people manually label examples. Platforms like CrowdFlower, Prolific, and CrowdCrafting can be used for crowd sourcing tasks without large

1. Our Data Ourselves: MobileMiner
•20 Young coders from “Young
Rewired State” were issued with
Android smartphones.
•Developed MobileMiner together,
an app that records the behaviour
of other apps.
•Return their data at hack-days.
•Discuss their attitudes to privacy
before and after confronting them
with their data.

2. OpenCellID and OSM are croud-sourced
• Full GPS is too invasive, and
consumes power.
• Avoid use of Google location API.
• OpenCellId provides locations of
(many) cell towers.
• http://opencellid.org

3. NervousNet from ETHZ:
•http://www.nervousnet.ethz.ch
•NervousNet hub mobile app polls
various physical sensors at a user-
defined rate.
•Data is pushed to one or more
remote “proxies”.
•Outputs of sensors combined into
“virtual sensors”.
•Small custom deployment at CCC
Congres.

4. Crowd Sourcing: Brand Disambiguation
●
Search YouTube for “apple and blackberry”.
●
Some videos will compare the firms and their prooducts.
●
Many will be about pies, jam, crumbles, etc...

5. Crowd Sourcing: Brand Disambiguation
●
Can discriminating between the two be easily automated?
●
Does the word “cook” in video descriptions imply they're about pies?
●
Not really!
●
What about “slice of pie”?
●
Better, but even that gets used as an “amusing” metaphor for market-share
sometimes:

6. Crowd Sourcing: Brand Disambiguation
●
A machine-learning approach? Natural language processing?
●
http://ianozsvald.com/category/socialmediabranddisambiguator/
●
Much of machine learning is “supervised”:
●
Train a model with labeled “gold-standard” examples.
●
Test the model by using it to classify more labled examples.
●
Use the model to classify unlabeled examples in production.
●
Use crowd sourcing to get labelled training/test examples.
●
http://crowdcrafting.org/project/piesorphones/

7. Crowd Sourcing: Alternative Platforms
●
See the GATE NLP crowd sourcing tutorial:
●
https://gate.ac.uk/wiki/TrainingCourseJune2016/
●
Amazon Mechanical Turk is now US only.
●
CrowdFlower is available, sign-up is free. (https://www.crowdflower.com/)
●
Cannot launch tasks with no payment.
●
SurveyMonkey has a free trial, but surveys are not true crowd sourcing. (
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/)
●
Proflific is geared towards research, no fee trial. (https://www.prolific.ac/)
●
CrowdCrafting is entirely free, but tasks must be unpaid.
(https://crowdcrafting.org)

8. CrowdCrafting
●
Sign up and create a new project.

9. CrowdCrafting
●
Tasks can be populated by media from cloud storage.

10. CrowdCrafting
●
Various task templates are available.

11. CrowdCrafting
●
Can import from YouTube playlists and Twitter searches.

12. CrowdCrafting
●
Pastebin can be used to host.csv files easily.

13. CrowdCrafting
●
Editing tasks can be straight-forward...

14. CrowdCrafting
●
...sometimes more advanced editing is needed.

15. A Crowd Sourcing Task...
●
In groups, think of a crowd-sourcing task that would be of genuine use or
interest.
●
How (in)tractable would your task be to automation?
●
How would you get data to populate the task?
●
How would you find workers to complete the task?
●
Could the task be framed such that there are non-financial incentives?

16. NervousNet:
http://www.nervousnet.ethz.ch
Our Data, Ourselves at PyData 2015:
https://youtu.be/hjjniizB794
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Read our blog:
http://big-social-data.net/
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