An introduction to the special issue on participatory sensing and crowd intelligence

Participatory sensing [Burke 2006] is an emerging computing paradigm that tasks everyday mobile devices to form participatory sensor networks. It allows the increasing number of mobile phone users to share local knowledge acquired by their sensorenhanced devices, such as monitoring of pollution or noise levels and traffic conditions. The sensing data from volunteer contributors can be further analyzed and processed to form crowd intelligence [Zhang et al. 2011], which can be elaborated into three dimensions: personal awareness, social awareness, and urban awareness. Layered on these concepts, we have raised the new term mobile crowd sensing and computing (MCSC) to characterize crowd intelligence extraction from large-scale and heterogeneous usercontributed data [Guo et al. 2014]. A formal definition of MCSC is as follows: a new sensing paradigm that empowers ordinary citizens to contribute data sensed or generated from their mobile devices, then aggregates and fuses the data in the cloud for crowd intelligence extraction and human-centric service delivery.