Multmedia Enabled Crowdsourcing Application for Mobile Devices

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has been a great topic of research and development recently due to the low cost of operation and perpetual availability. Smartphones have also grown to be very popular and pervasive. They are available these days with tremendous processing power equipped with great cameras, microphones, HD screens, GPS, and etc. It has been a while since cell phones and recently smartphones have been exploited for crowdsourcing purposes. There are already apps that provide features to report and help in process of recovering from disasters and natural phenomenon. Before smartphones era, text messages were used as a way of crowdsourcing as well as a source of income. Translation of small pieces of text was a common example of crowdsourcing where the user would receive a small text, translate and send it back and for every text they would make a small amount of money. However there has never been an app that is both multi- purpose and multimedia capable. In our proposed method and application (Crowdesk) the user is capable of choosing the type of their message including image and audio. Since we are dealing with larger file sizes when working with audio and image files, the network connection and transmission rate becomes an issue. We have utilized buffering techniques and breaking down the files into smaller pieces to overcome the connectivity speed problem. Tests and benchmarking have been performed for both cases where connected to a Wi-Fi access point with an Android device, or when 3G/4G is used for transmission of data, and for all cases, the results have been satisfactory. Crowdesk is solely meant to be a representation of what can be achieved by utilizing people's contribution on a mobile platform.