Guaranteeing quality of crowdsourcing public transportion run-time information

Public bus services in many cities around the world are controlled by private owners, which makes city-wide tracking bus service quality in real-time a challenging process.

Crowdsourcing this information in real-time is a promising approach in the absence of homogeneous information from the service providers. However, crowdsourcing suffers from other data quality issues, including non-uniform coverage of the bus network by bus riders.

Project goals

The goals of this project are to:

1. Investigate the impact of inhomogeneous coverage on crowd-sourcing public transport service quality information.
2. Search for countermeasures such as learning from history or incentivizing in real-time, to guarantee certain levels of information quality.

Supervision team

The University of Melbourne: Professor Stephan Winter and Doctor Martin Tomko

*Click on the researcher's name above to learn more about their publication and grant successes.

IIT Kharagpur: Associate Professor Sandip Chakraborty and Professor Niloy Ganguly

Who we are looking for

We are seeking a PhD candidate with the following skills:

• A masters in geoinformatics or computer science, and experience with spatial data analysis or machine learning.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Demonstrated organisational skills, time management and ability to work to priorities.
• Demonstrated problem-solving abilities.
• The ability to work independently and as a member of a team.

Further details

The PhD candidate will profit from the combined expertise of the project supervisors, and the embedding into two research environments. Professor Stephan Winter and Dr Martin Tomko at the University of Melbourne will contribute their expertise in movement analytics and service quality monitoring, and Associate Professor Sandip Chakraborty and Professor Niloy Ganguly at IIT Kharagpur will contribute their expertise in crowdsourced mobility tracking through smartphones.

The candidate will be enrolled in the PhD program at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IITKg, and in the PhD program at the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne.

To apply for this joint PhD opportunity, and to view the entry requirements, visit How to apply.