Crowd sourcing, with a few answers: Recommending commuters for traffic updates

Abstract

Real-time traffic awareness applications are playing an ever increasing role understanding and tackling traffic congestion in cities. First-hand accounts from drivers witnessing an incident is an invaluable source of information for traffic managers. Nowadays, drivers increasingly contact control rooms through social media to report on journey times, accidents or road weather conditions. These new interactions allow traffic controllers to engage users, and in particular to query them for information rather than passively collecting it. Querying participants presents the challenge of which users to probe for updates about a specific situation. In order to maximise the probability of a user responding and the accuracy of the information, we propose a strategy which takes into account the engagement levels of the user, the mobility profile and the reputation of the user. We provide an analysis of a real-world user corpus of Twitter users contributing updates to LiveDrive, a Dublin based traffic radio station.