Truthful Interval Cover Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing Applications

The varying nature of qualities and costs of the crowdworkers makes task allocation a non-trivial problem in almost all crowdsourcing applications. If crowdworkers are strategic about their costs, the problem becomes even more challenging. Interestingly, in several crowdsourcing applications, for example, traffic monitoring, air pollution monitoring, digital epidemiology, smart grids operations, etc., the structure of the tasks in space or time exhibits a natural linear ordering. Motivated by the above observation, we model the problem of task allocation to strategic crowdworkers as an interval cover mechanism design problem. In this mechanism, a planner (or task requester) needs to crowdsource labels for a set of tasks in a cost effective manner and make a high quality inference. We consider two different scenarios in this problem: homogeneous and heterogeneous, based on the qualities of crowdworkers. We show that the task allocation problem is polynomial time solvable in the homoge...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Pankaj Dayama, Balakrishnan Narayanaswamy, Dinesh Garg, Y. Narahari
• Keywords: ATAL 2015, Intelligent Agents