skip to main content
10.1145/2488388.2488458acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesthewebconfConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Using stranger as sensors: temporal and geo-sensitive question answering via social media

Published: 13 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

MoboQ is a location-based real-time social question answering service deployed in the field in China. Using MoboQ, people can ask temporal and geo-sensitive questions, such as how long is the line at a popular business right now, and then receive answers that crowdsourced from other users in a timely fashion. To obtain answers for questions, the system analyzes the live stream from public microblogging service Sina Weibo to identify people who are likely to currently be at the place that is associated with a question and sends them the unsolicited question through the microblogging service from which they were identified. MoboQ was deployed in China at the beginning of 2012, until October of the same year, it was used to ask 15,224 questions by 35,214 registered users, and it gathered 29,491 answers; 74.6% of the questions received at least one answer, 28% received a first response within 10 minutes, and 51% of the questions got first answer within 20 minutes. In total, 91% of the questions successfully found at least one answer candidate, and they were sent to 162,954 microblogging service users. We analyze the usage patterns and behaviors of the real-world end-users, discuss the lessons learned, and outline the future directions and possible applications that could be built on top of MoboQ.

References

[1]
E. Adar, et al. 00. Free riding on gnutella, First Monday vol. 5, no. 10--2 (2000).
[2]
L. von Ahn. 2007. Human computation. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Knowledge capture. K-CAP '07. ACM.
[3]
M. S. Bernstein, et al. 2010. Personalization via friend-sourcing. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. vol. 17, no. 2 (2010), 1--28.
[4]
J. Burke, et al. 2006. Participatory sensing. In Workshop on World-Sensor-Web: Mobile Device Centric Sensor Networks and Applications. WSW'06, ACM, Boulder, Colorado.
[5]
A. T. Campbell, et al. 2008. The Rise of People-Centric Sensing. IEEE Internet Computing. 12, no. 4 (2008): 12--21.
[6]
D. Chakrabarti, et al. 2011. Event Summarization using Tweets, In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. ICWSM '11. 66--73.
[7]
A. T. Crooks, et al. 2012. #Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System, Transactions in GIS. (2012).
[8]
J. Feng, et al. 2004. Empathy and online interpersonal trust: A fragile relationship. Behavior and Information Technology. 23, no.2 (2004). 97--106.
[9]
M. Guy, et al. 2010. Integration and Dissemination of Citizen Reported and Seismically Derived Earthquake Information via Social Network Technologies. Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis IX, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6065(2010), 42--53.
[10]
D. Horowitz, et al. 2010. The anatomy of a large- scale social search engine. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World Wide Web. WWW '10. 431- 440.
[11]
M. Jiang, et al. 2010. Human-centered Sensing for Crisis Response and Management Analysis Campaigns. In Proceedings of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRM '10. Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
[12]
G. Koutrika, et al. 2007. Questioning Yahoo! Answers. Technical Report. Stanford InfoLab.
[13]
H. Kim, et al. 2004. A comparison of online trust building factors between potential customers and repeat customers. Journal of Association for Information Systems. 5, no. 10 (2004): 392--420.
[14]
J. Kleinberg. 2007. Challenges in Mining Social Network Data: Processes, Privacy, and Paradoxes. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. KDD '07. ACM. 4--5.
[15]
B. Latane, et al. 1979. Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Personality and Social Psychology. 37, no. 6 (1979): 822.
[16]
S. Liu, et al. 2010. Ushahidi Haiti & Chile: Next Generation Crisis Mapping. American Congress on Surveying and Mapping Bulletin, ACSM Bulletin 246.
[17]
Y. Liu, et al. 2010. A crowdsourcing based mobile image translation and knowledge sharing service. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. MUM '10. ACM, 6--15.
[18]
Y. Liu, et al. 2012. Drawing on mobile crowds via social media. Multimedia Systems. vo.18, no.1, (2012): 53--67.
[19]
C. MacDonald and I. Ounis. 2006. Voting for candidates: adapting data fusion techniques for an expert search task. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management. CIKM '06. ACM, 387--396.
[20]
A. Mockus, et al. 2001. Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and mozilla. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. vol. 11, no. 3, (2001): 309--346.
[21]
M. R. Morris, et al. 2010. What do people ask their social networks, and why? A Survey study of status message Q&A behavior. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. CHI '10. ACM, 1739--1748.
[22]
J. Nichols and J. H. Kang. 2012. Asking questions of targeted strangers on social networks. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. CSCW '12, ACM, 999--1002.
[23]
J. Nichols, et al. 2012. Summarizing sporting events using twitter. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. IUI '12. ACM, 189--198.
[24]
O. Okolloh. 2009. Ushahidi or 'testimony': Web 2.0 tools for crowdsourcing crisis information. Participatory Learning and Action. 59, no. 1 (2009): 65--70.
[25]
K. Panovich, et al. 2012. Tie strength in question & answer on social network sites. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. CSCW '12. ACM, 1057--1066.
[26]
P. Persson, et al. 2003 GeoNotes: a location-based information system for public spaces. Designing information spaces: The social navigation approach (2003): 151--173.
[27]
T. Sakaki, et al. 2010. Earthquake Shakes Twitter Users: Real-time Event Detection by Social Sensors. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World Wide Web. WWW '10. ACM, 851--860.
[28]
A. Schmidt, et al. 1999. There is more to context than location. Computers and Graphics. 23, no. 6 (1999): 893--901.
[29]
P. Shankar, et al. 2012. Crowds replace Experts: Building Better Location-based Services using Mobile Social Network Interactions, In Pervasive Computing and Communications, IEEE International Conference on. PerCom '12. IEEE, 20--29.
[30]
I. Smith, et al. 2005. Social disclosure of place: From location technology to communication practice. In Pervasive Computing (2005): 151--164.
[31]
K. Tang, et al. Rethinking location sharing: exploring the implications of social-driven vs. purpose-driven location sharing. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing. UbiComp '10. ACM, 85--94.
[32]
T. Yan, et al. 2010. Crowdsearch: exploiting crowds for accurate real-time image search on mobile phones. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services. MobiSys '10. ACM, 77--90.
[33]
R. B. Zajonc. Social facilitation. Science 17 (1956): 65.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)“I Prefer Regular Visitors to Answer My Questions”: Users’ Desired Experiential Background of Contributors for Location-based Crowdsourcing PlatformProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642520(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2022)What Kinds of Experiences Do You Desire? A Preliminary Study of the Desired Experiences of Contributors to Location-Based Mobile CrowdsourcingExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519744(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2020)A Spatial Mobile Crowdsourcing Framework for Event ReportingIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2020.29675857:2(477-491)Online publication date: Apr-2020
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Using stranger as sensors: temporal and geo-sensitive question answering via social media

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      WWW '13: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
      May 2013
      1628 pages
      ISBN:9781450320351
      DOI:10.1145/2488388

      Sponsors

      • NICBR: Nucleo de Informatcao e Coordenacao do Ponto BR
      • CGIBR: Comite Gestor da Internet no Brazil

      In-Cooperation

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 13 May 2013

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. crowdsourcing
      2. human as sensors
      3. microblogging
      4. social media
      5. strangersourcing
      6. temporal and geo-sensitive question answering

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      WWW '13
      Sponsor:
      • NICBR
      • CGIBR
      WWW '13: 22nd International World Wide Web Conference
      May 13 - 17, 2013
      Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

      Acceptance Rates

      WWW '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 125 of 831 submissions, 15%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)7
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
      Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)“I Prefer Regular Visitors to Answer My Questions”: Users’ Desired Experiential Background of Contributors for Location-based Crowdsourcing PlatformProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642520(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
      • (2022)What Kinds of Experiences Do You Desire? A Preliminary Study of the Desired Experiences of Contributors to Location-Based Mobile CrowdsourcingExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519744(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
      • (2020)A Spatial Mobile Crowdsourcing Framework for Event ReportingIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2020.29675857:2(477-491)Online publication date: Apr-2020
      • (2020)Crowdsourcing Based Description of Urban Emergency Events Using Social Media Big DataIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2016.25176388:2(387-397)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2020
      • (2020)Collectively Sharing People’s Visual and Auditory Capabilities: Exploring Opportunities and PitfallsSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-020-00313-w1:5Online publication date: 10-Sep-2020
      • (2020)CASQAD – A New Dataset for Context-Aware Spatial Question AnsweringThe Semantic Web – ISWC 202010.1007/978-3-030-62466-8_1(3-17)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2020
      • (2020)Digitally Enhancing Society Through Structuralism: Virtualizing Collective Human Eyesight and Hearing Capabilities as a Case StudyDistributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions10.1007/978-3-030-50344-4_29(400-414)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2020
      • (2019)CloseUp—A Community-Driven Live Online Search EngineACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/330144219:3(1-21)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2019
      • (2019)Combining Spatial Optimization and Multi-Agent Temporal Difference Learning for Task Assignment in Uncertain CrowdsourcingInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-019-09938-6Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
      • (2019)A Ubiquitous Computing Platform for Virtualizing Collective Human Eyesight and Hearing CapabilitiesAmbient Intelligence – Software and Applications –,10th International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-24097-4_4(27-35)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2019
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media