With smart-phones in their pockets, more than 1 billion people now have immediate access to sensing, computation, and connectivity, and this makes it possible to harness the power of the crowd to collect and share data about their surroundings and experiences on a massive scale. Crowdsensing/ crowdsourcing is a novel data collection paradigm that leverages this vast mobile sensor network, expanding the scope of research endeavours and allowing civic issues to be addressed, without the need to purchase specialized sensors or install and maintain network infrastructure. Data collected using such applications may come from unexpected yet interesting and valuable sources, supporting sensing in previously inaccessible locations and contexts.

This new data collection paradigm introduces several research challenges. Privacy is a primary concern for users that are contributing sensitive or identifying data. Incentive mechanisms for participation may be needed to encourage people to volunteer their resources to collect data. Methods are needed for processing large-scale, user-generated data sets into meaningful information, and for assessing and understanding the quality of information to help guide decision-making. Approaches that involve the crowd in such data analysis tasks, with humans serving as a source of semantic information for, or interpreting and evaluating, crowdsensed/crowdsourced data, can also help to build an understanding of the physical, computational, and socio-technical environment.

The objective of CASPer 2016 is to provide a forum for discussion, debate, and collaboration focused on: integrated approaches, frameworks, privacy considerations, incentive mechanisms, algorithms, and social (i.e. human) sensor utilization, for crowdsensing and crowdsourcing. We invite original research contributions that advance the state of the art as well as position papers that pose important questions, point in new directions, or present a controversial point of view. Please see the call for papers for a full list of topics of interest.