With the rapid development of mobile devices and crowdsourcing platforms, the spatial crowdsourcing has attracted much attention from the database community. Specifically, the spatial crowdsourcing refers to sending location-based requests to workers, based on their current positions. In this paper, we consider a spatial crowdsourcing scenario, in which each worker has a set of qualified skills, whereas each spatial task (e.g., repairing a house, decorating a room, and performing entertainment shows for a ceremony) is time-constrained, under the budget constraint, and required a set of skills. Under this scenario, we will study an important problem, namely multi-skill spatial crowdsourcing (MS-SC), which finds an optimal worker-and-task assignment strategy, such that skills between workers and tasks match with each other, and workers’ benefits are maximized under the budget constraint. We prove that the MS-SC problem is NP-hard and intractable. Therefore, we propose three effective heuristic approaches, including greedy, $g$ -divide-and-conquer and cost-model-based adaptive algorithms to get worker-and-task assignments. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our MS-SC processing approaches on both real and synthetic data sets.

Reverse skyline queries over uncertain databases have many important applications such as sensor data monitoring and business planning. Due to the existence of uncertainty in many real-world data, answering reverse skyline queries accurately and efficiently over uncertain data has become increasingly important. In this paper, we model the probabilistic reverse skyline query on uncertain data, in both monochromatic and bichromatic cases, and propose effective pruning methods to reduce the search space of query processing. Moreover, efficient query procedures have been presented seamlessly integrating the proposed pruning methods. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approach with various experimental settings. Copyright 2008 ACM

With the rapid development of mobile devices and the crowdsourcing platforms, the spatial crowdsourcing has attracted much attention from the database community, specifically, spatial crowdsourcing refers to sending a location-based request to workers according to their positions. In this paper, we consider an important spatial crowdsourcing problem, namely reliable diversity-based spatial crowdsourcing (RDB-SC), in which spatial tasks (such as taking videos/photos of a landmark or firework shows, and checking whether or not parking spaces are available) are time-constrained, and workers are moving towards some directions. Our RDB-SC problem is to assign workers to spatial tasks such that the completion reliability and the spatial/temporal diversities of spatial tasks are maximized. We prove that the RDB-SC problem is NP-hard and intractable. Thus, we propose three effective approximation approaches, including greedy, sampling, and divide-and-conquer algorithms. In order to improve the efficiency, we also design an effective cost-model-based index, which can dynamically maintain moving workers and spatial tasks with low cost, and efficiently facilitate the retrieval of RDB-SC answers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approaches over both real and synthetic datasets.

With the rapid advancement of mobile devices and crowdsourcing platforms, spatial crowdsourcing has attracted much attention from various research communities. A spatial crowdsourcing system periodically matches a number of location-based workers with nearby spatial tasks (e.g., taking photos or videos at some specific locations). Previous studies on spatial crowdsourcing focus on task assignment strategies that maximize an assignment score based solely on the available information about workers/tasks at the time of assignment. These strategies can only achieve local optimality by neglecting the workers/tasks that may join the system in a future time. In contrast, in this paper, we aim to improve the global assignment, by considering both present and future (via predictions) workers/tasks. In particular, we formalize a new optimization problem, namely maximum quality task assignment (MQA). The optimization objective of MQA is to maximize a global assignment quality score, under a traveling budget constraint. To tackle this problem, we design an effective grid-based prediction method to estimate the spatial distributions of workers/tasks in the future, and then utilize the predictions to assign workers to tasks at any given time instance. We prove that the MQA problem is NP-hard, and thus intractable. Therefore, we propose efficient heuristics to tackle the MQA problem, including MQA greedy and MQA divide-and-conquer approaches, which can efficiently assign workers to spatial tasks with high quality scores and low budget consumptions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approaches on both real and synthetic datasets.

Since many graph data are often noisy and incomplete in real applications, it has become increasingly important to retrieve graphs g in the graph database D that approximately match the query graph q, rather than exact graph matching. In this paper, we study the problem of graph similarity search, which retrieves graphs that are similar to a given query graph under the constraint of graph edit distance. We propose a systematic method for edit-distance based similarity search problem. Specifically, we derive two lower bounds, i.e., partition-based and branch-based bounds, from different perspectives. More importantly, a hybrid lower bound incorporating both ideas of the two lower bounds is proposed, which is theoretically proved to have higher (at least not lower) pruning power than using the two lower bounds together. We also present a uniform index structure, namely u-tree, to facilitate effective pruning and efficient query processing. Extensive experiments confirm that our proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches significantly, in terms of both the pruning power and query response time.