The overall INCEPTION goal is to design, build and deploy an open, incentive-based software platform of cooperating sensors, actuators, mobile devices and othersmart objects. This platform will be adaptive, powerful, and flexible enough so as to enable the development of a new generation of data acquisition and data integration technologies.

To achieve the aforementioned goal, the project will address concrete objectives from two areas:

Research Area 1: Economics of Participatory Sensing and Game Theoretic Aspects

The large amount of data available today will allow the improvement of offered services, but at the same time there are various forms of cost in obtaining and provisioning the information. In this project we aim to create an open, flexible and powerful mechanism that allows applications to have access to information and at the same time compensates the information suppliers and gives the individuals explicit control over their own data. To achieve our objective, we use an economics and game-theoretic framework to address the problem. The detailed objectives are presented below:

Objective 1.1: To develop a specialized virtual marketplace where sellers of information (sensors) and buyers of information (applications) dynamically interact to create an open market and define compensations (rewards) and charges for providing and consuming information according to its usefulness and market availability.

Objective 1.2: To design and assess the appropriate incentives mechanisms for this market and demonstrate how their use leads to achieving improved service delivery and greater participation by the community.

Objective 1.3: To define an internal virtual currency mechanism essential for the realisation of a complete ecosystem where users contributing sensor information can spend their virtual revenues by subscribing to applications and getting a differential quality treatment when available.

Objective 1.4: To design algorithms to optimise the information management and trading in the virtual marketplace and at the same time take into account game-theoretic aspects.

Research Area 2: Participatory Sensing Supporting Infrastructure

The scope of this area is to develop the appropriate methodologies that will support the creation, and deployment of our economically-driven data collection and trading framework. We focus on building a real system, and in addressing the real hard requirements and constraints posed by the mobile smartphone environment. The detailed objectives and expected results are presented below:

Objective 2.1: To develop a specialized virtual marketplace where sellers of information (sensors) and buyers of information (applications) dynamically interact to create an open market and define compensations (rewards) and charges for providing and consuming information according to its usefulness and market availability.

Objective 2.2: To design and assess the appropriate incentives mechanisms for this market and demonstrate how their use leads to achieving improved service delivery and greater participation by the community.

Objective 2.3: To define an internal virtual currency mechanism essential for the realisation of a complete ecosystem where users contributing sensor information can spend their virtual revenues by subscribing to applications and getting a differential quality treatment when available.

Objective 1.4: To design algorithms to optimise the information management and trading in the virtual marketplace and at the same time take into account game-theoretic aspects.