Search results for "Crowds"

Analysing Incentive Strategies to Promote Participation in Crowdsourcing Systems

2016

In this paper, we define two strategies for crowdsourcing systems to encourage users to participate at a cost that is close to the optimal cost for the system. In the scenario considered, the system has temporal constraints and potential participants have dynamic behaviors related to the expected rewards (i.e., users’ expected rewards in exchange of their contributions change over time). We propose and evaluate two types of strategies that promote participation of users through monetary rewards that can change as time passes in order to adapt them to the population dynamic behaviors.

Crowd Models for Emergency Evacuation: A Review Targeting Human-Centered Sensing

2013

Emergency evacuation of crowds is a fascinating phenomenon that has attracted researchers from various fields. Better understanding of this class of crowd behavior opens up for improving evacuation policies and smarter design of buildings, increasing safety. Recently, a new class of disruptive technology has appeared: Human-centered sensing which allows crowd behavior to be monitored in real-time, and provides the basis for real-time crowd control. The question then becomes: to what degree can previous crowd models incorporate this development, and what areas need further research? In this paper, we provide a survey that describes some widely used crowd models and discuss their advantages a…

Crowdboard: An Augmented Whiteboard to Support Large-Scale Co-Design

2013

Co-design efforts attempt to account for many diverse viewpoints. However, design teams lack support for meaningful real-time interaction with a large community of potential stakeholders. We present Crowdboard, a novel whiteboard system that enables many potential stakeholders to provide real-time input during early-stage design activities, such as concept mapping. Local design teams develop ideas on a standard whiteboard, which is augmented with annotations and comments from online participants. The system makes it possible for design teams to solicit real-time opinions and ideas from a community of people intrinsically motivated to shape the product/service.

A comparative study of partitioning methods for crowd simulations

2010

The simulation of large crowds of autonomous agents with realistic behavior is still a challenge for several computer research communities. In order to handle large crowds, some scalable architectures have been proposed. Nevertheless, the effective use of distributed systems requires the use of partitioning methods that can properly distribute the workload generated by agents among the existing distributed resources. In this paper, we analyze the use of irregular shape regions (convex hulls) for solving the partitioning problem. We have compared a partitioning method based on convex hulls with two techniques that use rectangular regions. The performance evaluation results show that the conv…

Factors influencing tourists’ intention to use COVID-19 contact tracing app

2020

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to develop and test a model that explores the antecedents of tourists’ acceptance of COVID-19 contact tracing app (CTA). Data was obtained from a crowdsourcing platform (Pollfish), in which 400 respondents answered the questionnaire. We used SmartPLS to analyse the data. Results reveal that trust and structural assurance have the strongest relationship. Furthermore, the relationship between trust and destination safety was positive. Finally, self-efficacy moderated the relationship between trust and intention, implying that trust was stronger for tourists who have higher levels of self-efficacy. Recommendations are offered.

Analysis and approximation of one-dimensional scalar conservation laws with general point constraints on the flux

2016

We introduce and analyze a class of models with nonlocal point constraints for traffic flow through bottlenecks, such as exits in the context of pedestrians traffic and reduction of lanes on a road under construction in vehicular traffic. Constraints are defined based on data collected from non-local in space and/or in time observations of the flow. We propose a theoretical analysis and discretization framework that permits to include different data acquisition strategies; a numerical comparison is provided. Nonlocal constraint allows to model, e.g., the irrational behavior (" panic ") near the exit observed in dense crowds and the capacity drop at tollbooth in vehicular traffic. Existence …

A GPU-Based Multi-agent System for Real-Time Simulations

2010

The huge number of cores existing in current Graphics Processor Units (GPUs) provides these devices with computing capabilities that can be exploited by distributed applications. In particular, these capabilites have been used in crowd simulations for enhancing the crowd rendering, and even for simulating continuum crowds. However, GPUs have not been used for simulating large crowds of complex agents, since these simulations require distributed architectures that can support huge amounts of agents. In this paper, we propose a GPU-based multi-agent system for crowd simulation. Concretely, we propose the use of an on-board GPU to implement one of the main tasks that a distributed server for c…

Technoscientific Citizenship in Citizen Science. Assembling Crowds for Biomedical Research

2020

This chapter explores “citizen science” as a contemporary variant of participatory citizenship. It analyzes how two biomedical online citizen science projects address potential participants. What does it mean to enact citizenship in these citizen science projects according to the self-descriptions of the projects? How do their web interfaces regulate participation?

Simulation-based Evacuation Planning for Urban Areas

2021

Evacuation planning is a critical task in disaster management. Especially in situations such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, large crowds need to move away from danger and reach designated safe zones. For this purpose, various approaches that efficiently compute evacuation plans in urban areas have been proposed. To evaluate the computed plans, previous works employ heuristics that can only roughly estimate the egress time of each plan. Intuitively, a much better approach is to estimate the egress time via simulation. However, designing a simulation model is usually a time-consuming task and, what is more, this model can only be used to evaluate evacuation plans for a specific ar…

1993

Let us sit on the terrace of a street cafe and watch the crowds pass by. The first basic unit we observe is the individual: tall, small, fat, long-faced, round-faced — the diversity is large. Among these individuals there will be a few with particular features, such as colour of skin or type of hair, which differ from the vast majority of local individuals, thereby indicating that they originated from another part of the world. We shall install a video camera at this site and will carry out the same observations simultaneously in Paris, Dakar, and Tokyo. When the films are then brought together and shown in the same room, the observers will not fail to note that the individuals of one city …