In this work, we focus on two attractive crowd-based business models, i.e., user-generated content creation and freight-matching long-haul trucking. First, as elaborated in CHAPTER 2, we consider a game theoretical modeling approach for understanding the operation of non-profit UGC platforms that rely on users to create content and maintain financial sustainability. In particular, we examine several interesting research questions with practical importance and unique contributions to the literature. These research questions mainly investigate how changes in critical business factors influence the platforms' strategic effort allocation, user participation, and overall performance. Second, in CHAPTER 3, we focus on the flourishing freight-matching businesses that rely on crowdsourced drivers for long-haul trucking. In particular, although the practice suggests that shippers' ordering behaviors of freight-matching services may remarkably impact crowdsourced drivers' bidding behaviors, the literature has yet to examine this issue formally. Therefore, we collect industrial data and construct a strict empirical schema for understanding the association between shippers' order timing and freight-matching performance. Besides, by deliberately building a theoretical modeling framework and using a data-driven estimation of model parameters, we are able to simulate the freight-matching performance of adopting our empirical findings and evaluate the practical value of our study. By investigating these two prominent business models, we aim to understand the advantages of crowdsourcing businesses and the role of crowds in nowadays' business innovations. Besides, we also provide valuable managerial insights for business runners who are interested in this "young" market of crowdsourcing businesses. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

<p>The rise of technologies and the Internet have provided opportunities to connect logistics demand and supply using the crowd. In this system, named crowd-shipping (CS), a requester doing the shipping selects a courier via a platform. In reality, the idea of CS has been explored by many firms over the last several years. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the issues related to: (1) the markets that are likely to be influenced by CS; (2) the considerations that govern the success of this system; and the (3) the impacts of CS and its design.</p><p><br></p> <p>To address these issues, there is a need of understanding CS system's stakeholders, such as requesters' (i.e. senders') and potential couriers' (i.e. driver-partners') behaviors as well as operations and management of CS firms. This research will address these gaps by conducting a survey to understand driver-partners' behaviors and requesters' behaviors given the CS services availability in the logistics market. Then, pricing and compensation strategies are designed and modeled based on behavior rules of supply and demand generations as well as various CS market penetrations. As such, this research addresses the CS industry in a triad of supply, demand, and operations and management.</p><p><br></p> <p>This research uses advanced econometrics, statistics analysis, mixed integer optimization, and data science techniques to analyze data and generate insights. The contributions of this research are to identify the contributing factors that impact the emerging logistics service. This research also reveals factors that influence the current and future shipping behaviors of requesters, as well as influencing factors of the individuals' willingness to work as driver-partners. The integrated matching and routing models have been developed to examine different pricing and compensation strategies under several market penetration scenarios. `Individual' price and compensation have found to provide the highest profit for CS platform providers.</p><p><br></p> <p>This research provides meaningful knowledge for stakeholders, especially for the CS firms to develop business strategies. Several remarkable benefits that CS firms can obtain include: focusing on some specific population groups to recruit driver-partners (e.g. people with children, middle-aged people having lower incomes, or no car ownership); addressing certain market segments to promote CS services (e.g. tight-window delivery packages, peripheral products, or personal health and medicine items); implementing `individual' or `flatted' pricing and compensation strategies depending on the time of the day, the day of the week, or the market penetration; and improving platform features to incorporate requesters' and driver-partners' expectations.</p>

Excerpt: Time and expense are perhaps the two biggest challenges in evaluating existing measures and devoloping new metrics. Measuring social characterists of a population such as religion typically involves expensive surveys undertaken by professional survey firms or academic centers.

With the ever-increasing trend in the number of social interactions getting intermediated by technology (the world wide web) as the backdrop, this thesis focuses on the design of mechanisms for online communities (crowds) which strive to come together, albeit in ad-hoc fashion, to achieve a social objective. Two examples of such web-based social communities which are of central concern in this thesis are crowdsourcing markets and crowdfunding platforms. For these settings which involve strategic human agents, we design mechanisms that incentivize contributions (effort, funds, or information) from the crowd and aggregate these contributions to achieve the specified objective. Our work is thus concerned with the challenge of designing mechanisms which encourage social coordination and cooperation among large groups of (of-ten) anonymous users to achieve group efficiency (social welfare). We address the following four related challenges: • Can we design mechanisms to solve the free-rider problem in public goods settings? Can large anonymous groups of individuals be incentivized to contribute to create public goods? • Can we design mechanisms that harness social networks to achieve coordination of contributions towards a public good to ensure that publicly desirable goods are successfully funded via private contributions? How do we make such mechanisms fair • Can we design mechanisms that improve the efficiency of markets by expanding the set of individuals who participate in the market? Can these individuals be incentivized to increase the group efficiency and, if so, at what cost? • Can we design mechanisms that make crowdsourcing markets more equitable by offering participation opportunities to novices and higher incentives to agents with high reliability? What is the price of reliability? Using mechanism design as the principal design tool, the thesis attempts to offer rigorous solutions to the above challenges

MCC (Mobile Cloud Computing) est un candidat très fort pour le NGN (Next Generation Network) qui permet aux utilisateurs mobiles d’avoir une mobilité étendue, une continuité de service et des performances supérieures. Les utilisateurs peuvent s’attendre à exécuter leurs travaux plus rapidement, avec une faible consommation de batterie et à des prix abordables ; mais ce n’est pas toujours le cas. Diverses applications mobiles ont été développées pour tirer parti de cette nouvelle technologie, mais chacune de ces applications possède ses propres exigences. Plusieurs MCA (Mobile Cloud Architectures) ont été proposées, mais aucune n'a été adaptée pour toutes les applications mobiles, ce qui a mené à une faible satisfaction du client. De plus, l'absence d'un modèle d'affaires (business model) valide pour motiver les investisseurs a empêché son déploiement à l'échelle de production. Cette thèse propose une nouvelle architecture de MCA (Mobile Cloud Architecture) qui positionne l'opérateur de téléphonie mobile au cœur de cette technologie avec un modèle d'affaires de recettes. Cette architecture, nommée OCMCA (Operator Centric Mobile Cloud Architecture), relie l'utilisateur d’un côté et le fournisseur de services Cloud (CSP) de l'autre côté, et héberge un cloud dans son réseau. La connexion OCMCA / utilisateur peut utiliser les canaux multiplex menant à un service beaucoup moins cher pour les utilisateurs, mais avec plus de revenus, et de réduire les embouteillages et les taux de rejet pour l'opérateur. La connexion OCMCA / CSP est basée sur la fédération, ainsi un utilisateur qui a été enregistré avec n’importe quel CSP, peut demander que son environnement soit déchargé de cloud hébergé par l'opérateur de téléphonie mobile afin de recevoir tous les services et les avantages de OCMCA.Les contributions de cette thèse sont multiples. Premièrement, nous proposons OCMCA et nous prouvons qu'il a un rendement supérieur à toutes les autres MCA (Mobile Cloud Architectures). Le modèle d'affaires (business model) de cette architecture se concentre sur la liberté de l'abonnement de l'utilisateur, l'utilisateur peut ainsi être abonné à un fournisseur de cloud et être toujours en mesure de se connecter via cette architecture à son environnement à l'aide du déchargement et de la fédération... / Mobile cloud computing is a very strong candidate for the title "Next Generation Network" which empowers mobile users with extended mobility, service continuity and superior performance. Users can expect to execute their jobs faster, with lower battery consumption and affordable prices; however this is not always the case. Various mobile applications have been developed to take advantage of this new technology, but each application has its own requirements. Several mobile cloud architectures have been proposed but none was suitable for all mobile applications which resulted in lower customer satisfaction. In addition to that, the absence of a valid business model to motivate investors hindered its deployment on production scale. This dissertation proposes a new mobile cloud architecture which positions the mobile operator at the core of this technology equipped with a revenue-making business model. This architecture, named OCMCA (Operator Centric Mobile Cloud Architecture), connects the user from one side and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) from the other and hosts a cloud within its network. The OCMCA/user connection can utilize multicast channels leading to a much cheaper service for the users and more revenues, lower congestion and rejection rates for the operator. The OCMCA/CSP connection is based on federation, thus a user who has been registered with any CSP, can request her environment to be offloaded to the mobile operator's hosted cloud in order to receive all OCMCA's services and benefits...

This thesis provides a novel investigation into rainfall-runoff processes occurring within a unique two-tiered depth-driven overland flow physical modelling environment, as well as within a numerical model context where parameterisation and DEM/building resolution influences have been investigated using an innovative de-coupled methodology. Two approaches to simulating urban rainfall-runoff responses were used. Firstly, a novel, 9 m2 physical modelling environment consisting of a: (i) a low-cost rainfall simulator component able to simulate consistent, uniformly distributed rainfall events of varying duration and intensity, and; (ii) a modular plot surface layer was used. Secondly, a numerical hydroinundation model (FloodMap2D-HydroInundation) was used to simulate a short-duration, high intensity surface water flood event (28th June 2012, Loughborough University campus). The physical model showed sensitivities to a number of meteorological and terrestrial factors. Results demonstrated intuitive model sensitivity to increasing the intensity and duration of rainfall, resulting in higher peak discharges and larger outflow volumes at the model outflow unit, as well as increases in the water depth within the physical model plot surface. Increases in percentage permeability were also shown to alter outflow flood hydrograph shape, volume, magnitude and timing due to storages within the physical model plot. Thus, a reduction in the overall volume of water received at the outflow hydrograph and a decrease in the peak of the flood event was observed with an increase in permeability coverage. Increases in the density of buildings resulted in a more rapid receding limb of the hydrograph and a steeper rising limb, suggesting a more rapid hydrological response. This indicates that buildings can have a channelling influence on surface water flows as well as a blockage effect. The layout and distribution of permeable elements was also shown to affect the rainfall-runoff response recorded at the model outflow, with downstream concentrated permeability resulting in statistically different hydrograph outflow data, but the layout of buildings was not seen to result in significant changes to the outflow flood hydrographs; outflow hydrographs appeared to only be influenced by the actual quantity and density of buildings, rather than their spatial distribution and placement within the catchment. Parameterisation of hydraulic (roughness) and hydrological (drainage rate, infiltration and evapotranspiration) model variables, and the influence of mesh resolution of elevation and building elements on surface water inundation outputs, both at the global and local level, were studied. Further, the viability of crowdsourced approaches to provide external model validation data in conjunction with dGPS water depth data was assessed. Parameterisation demonstrated that drainage rate changes within the expected range of parameter values resulted in considerable losses from the numerical model domain at global and local scales. Further, the model was also shown to be moderately sensitive to hydraulic conductivity and roughness parameterisation at both scales of analysis. Conversely, the parameterisation of evapotranspiration demonstrated that the model was largely insensitive to any changes of evapotranspiration rates at the global and local scales. Detailed analyses at the hotspot level were critical to calibrate and validate the numerical model, as well as allowing small-scale variations to be understood using at-a-point hydrograph assessments. A localised analysis was shown to be especially important to identify the effects of resolution changes in the DEM and buildings which were shown to be spatially dependent on the density, presence, size and geometry of buildings within the study site. The resolution of the topographic elements of a DEM were also shown to be crucial in altering the flood characteristics at the global and localised hotspot levels. A novel de-coupled investigation of the elevation and building components of the DEM in a strategic matrix of scenarios was used to understand the independent influence of building and topographic mesh resolution effects on surface water flood outputs. Notably, the inclusion of buildings on a DEM surface was shown to have a considerable influence on the distribution of flood waters through time (regardless of resolution), with the exclusion of buildings from the DEM grid being shown to produce less accurate results than altering the overall resolution of the horizontal DEM grid cells. This suggests that future surface water flood studies should focus on the inclusion and representation of buildings and structural features present on the DEM surface as these have a crucial role in modifying rainfall-runoff responses. Focus on building representation was shown to be more vital than concentrating on advances in the horizontal resolution of the grid cells which make up a DEM, as a DEM resolution of 2 m was shown to be sufficiently detailed to conduct the urban surface water flood modelling undertaken, supporting previous inundation research.

Exploring upon the phenomena of smart cities, this paper elaborates the potential of crowdsourced data collection in small scale urban quarters. The development of the Data4City (D4C) hyperlocal app – PinCity – is based on the idea of increasing the density of real-time information in urban areas (urban neighborhoods) in order to optimize or create innovative urban services (such as public transportation, garbage collection) or urban planning, thus improving the quality of life of quarter inhabitants as a long-term goal. The main principle of the app is the small-scale implementation, as opposed to top-down smart city approaches worldwide, preferably in a city quarter, or a community, which can be subsequently scaled and interlaced to other parts of the city.

This thesis explores the application of a neural network approach to cell tower localization using crowdsourced measurements. The deployment of cell tower infrastructure has been increasing exponentially in recent times as it is a crucial element of mobile communications. Location information is key to the quality of 4G LTE and 5G wireless service, establishing accurate coverage maps and different connectivity studies. Mobile carriers do not usually disclose the location of their cell towers due to security concerns, regulatory requirements, or market competition. In addition, open-source datasets on cell tower localization available online are often incomplete, inaccurate, or non-existent. Crowdsourcing enables the collection of large amounts of signal measurements from several mobile devices. By labeling these measurements with ground truth locations of base stations, we can address this challenge, employing a machine learning framework to predict the geographical locations of cell towers. The methodology followed in this project involves data preprocessing and feature engineering of a crowdsourced dataset along with the implementation and tuning of a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network model. The cell tower approximations obtained with this method excelled other state-of-the-art localization algorithms and provide a better estimation of telecommunication infrastructure deployments than open-source datasets. Overall, this thesis discusses the feasibility of employing a neural network model for predicting cell tower locations, while addressing some limitations and possible improvements for the localization problem. / Denna avhandling utforskar tillämpningen av ett neuralt nätverkstilvägagångssätt för lokalisering av mobiltelefonmaster med hjälp av crowdsourcade mätningar. Utbyggnaden av infrastrukturen för mobiltelefonmaster har ökat exponentiellt på senare tid eftersom den är en avgörande del av mobil kommunikation. Platsinformation är nyckeln till kvaliteten på 4G LTE och 5G trådlös tjänst, att etablera precisa täckningskartor och olika anslutningsstudier. Mobiloperatörer avslöjar vanligtvis inte platsen för sina mobiltelefonmaster på grund av säkerhetshänsyn, regulatoriska krav eller marknadskonkurrens. Dessutom är öppna datakällor för lokalisering av mobiltelefonmaster som finns tillgängliga online ofta ofullständiga, felaktiga eller icke-existerande. Crowdsourcing möjliggör insamling av stora mängder signalmätningar från flera mobila enheter. Genom att märka dessa mätningar med de faktiska platserna för basstationer kan vi ta itu med denna utmaning, genom att använda ett ramverk för maskininlärning för att förutsäga de geografiska platserna för mobiltelefonmaster. Metodiken som följdes i detta projekt involverar datapreprocessering och egenskapsingenjörskonst av en crowdsourcad datamängd tillsammans med implementering och justering av en flerlagers perceptron (MLP) neuralt nätverksmodell. Mobiltelefonmästarnas approximationer som erhållits med denna metod överträffade andra toppmoderna lokaliseringsalgoritmer och ger en bättre uppskattning av telekommunikationsinfrastrukturutplaceringar än öppna datakällor. Sammantaget diskuterar denna avhandling genomförbarheten av att använda en neuralt nätverksmodell för att förutsäga platser för mobiltelefonmaster, samtidigt som den tar upp vissa begränsningar och möjliga förbättringar för lokaliseringsproblemet.

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In order to trace the shifting cultural value(s) of photographic documentation, in this paper we present selected outcomes of a series of workshops hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London (TPG),which developed around the question: How can institutions engage with this expanded field of visual documentation, and what are the implications for art history and cultural memory? In the paper we consider the ways in which documentation is diffused, operationalized and valorized by different agents in contemporary visual culture.