Mobile crowd sensing of human-like intelligence using social sensors: A survey

Abstract Recently, with the fast proliferation of smart phones, mobile phone has the powerful ability of not only communication but also computation. Human beings are not only data consumers, but data producer with their objective or subjective sensing needs. Mobile crowd sensing 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 sensor-enhanced devices. Social sensors, social sensor receiver platform, and mobile crowd sensing paradigm compose a process by which physical sensors present in mobile devices such as GPS are used to infer social relationships and human activities. In this survey, we review the mobile crowd sensing applications on social sensors based on social sensor receiver platform (e.g., Weibo and Twitter) from three categories: public security, smart city, and location based services. Most applications adopted in current works fit in one of these categories. Existing works on applications of mobile crowd sensing on social sensors are collected and studied. Some possible future directions of potential new application category are proposed and analyzed.