STAC: spatial task assignment for crowd sensing with cloaked participant locations

Abstract

We propose to demonstrate STAC, a tool for spatial task assignment with cloaked locations in crowd sensing applications. The need for systems such as STAC becomes critical when participants of crowd sensing applications hesitate to share their locations due to privacy concerns. In such applications, STAC enables effective task assignment capabilities without compromising the location privacy of workers and volunteers. STAC implements novel algorithms that handle uncertain task assignment, which is a challenging problem involving uncertain locations of participants as a result of location cloaking. We will demonstrate, from both synthetic and real data, that our methods achieve high sensing coverage with low cost using cloaked participant locations. We will also demonstrate a location-based mobile Q&A application that utilizes STAC for task assignment.