A Blockchain-Based Federated Crowdsourcing Platform for Privacy-Preserving Applications

Description

Crowdsourcing is an emerging technology that utilizes the collective intelligence to solve complex tasks. In a crowdsourcing system, there are three parties, task-requesters, a crowdsourcing server (called broker), and task-workers. The requesters publish their tasks and the workers submit their interests to the broker. The broker matches the task requirements with the worker’s interests and recommends the best matched tasks to workers. The current crowdsourcing systems have three major problems: 1) lack of a federated platform that interconnects ask-requesters to all potential workers crossing the boundary of individual systems; 2) lack of a privacy-preserving mechanism that protects the confidentiality of tasks and interests of workers against untrusted brokers; and 3) lack of a fair mechanism that can enforce the execution of the contracts between the task-requesters and the workers and reward the honest workers. The principal goal of this project is to develop a federation of crowdsourcing systems by using the blockchain technology. The project work consists of three major tasks: 1) Design a blockchain-based federated framework that supports task recommendations across multiple crowdsourcing systems; 2) Design an efficient and secure on-chain task-worker matching scheme that can support task matching over encrypted data for large scale of tasks and workers in crowdsourcing; 3) Design a secure and fair scheme for crowdsourcing results collection and evaluation that can make an unbiased evaluation of collected results and reward honest workers with contracted payment.