Influence- and Interest-Based Worker Recruitment in Crowdsourcing Using Online Social Networks
To address the cold-start problem in mobile crowdsourcing—characterized by an initial scarcity of workers and low task response rates (~4%)—and to overcome limitations of existing recruitment methods in team composition, procedural clarity, and adaptability, this paper proposes an influencer-driven recruitment framework leveraging online social networks. Our method introduces a grouped, interest-aware influence maximization algorithm and a dynamic backup mechanism that replaces workers who decline tasks in real time, enabling end-to-end executable recruitment. It integrates social attribute modeling, genetic optimization, and dynamic task allocation. Extensive evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates that our approach improves effective worker coverage by 32.7% on average over baseline methods, significantly enhancing Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees.