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Crowdsourcing through web technologies has emerged as a key method and tool for conducting distributed work. There are new platforms constantly emerging that aim to provide crowdsourcing opportunities on mobile phones. However, most of these systems are very specific to certain types of tasks and do not address various mobile resource constraints experienced in developing countries such as India. We propose and design a new platform Wallah that tries to address these limitations with a broad vision to make crowdsourcing opportunities pervasively available and feasible to do (i.e., at all times, locations, and with minimum investment in infrastructure from the crowd-workers). It supports task-centric applications to minimize the impact of screen size and facilitates caching of crowdsourcing tasks to deal with network limitations. Wallah supports both physical as well as virtual crowdsourcing tasks. The current version of Wallah implements an end-to-end platform for Android devices and includes five different task-centric applications for different categories of crowdsourcing tasks (human OCR, image tagging, language translation, audio transcription, and video tagging) developed by us. We evaluated the system with a 2 week pilot deployment among 59 crowd-workers where over 16000 tasks were performed. We analyzed the platform usage in detail and present descriptive statistics related to task completion time and task accuracy rates with other analysis such as the impact of screen size on task completion time and accuracy. We also conducted a post study survey to get participant's qualitative feedback and their perceived difficulties of different crowdsourcing tasks.

Silicate materials such as quartz and silica glass are inherently brittle in nature. Here, using atomistic simulations, we demonstrate that the quartz crystal exhibits a brittle‐to‐ductile transition when irradiated. We show that the nanoscale plasticity observed in the irradiated structure is reminiscent of metal‐like plasticity, which is neither observed in the isochemical crystalline or glassy structure. Invoking an energy landscape approach, we demonstrate that the local atomic self‐organization facilitated by the shallow energy landscape is at the origin of this plastic behavior. Overall, the results suggest that the irradiation could be a methodology to induce a ductile transition in materials that are otherwise brittle.

Prolonged sitting and physical inactivity at workplace often lead to various health risks such as diabetes, heart attack, cancer etc. Many organizations are investing in wellness programs to ensure the well-being of their employees. Generally wearable devices are used in such wellness programs to detect health problems of employees, but studies have shown that wearables do not result in sustained adoption. Heart rate measurement has emerged as an effective tool to detect various ailments such as anxiety, stress, cardiovascular diseases etc. There are pre-existing techniques that use webcam feed to sense heart rate subject to some experimental constraints like stillness of face, light illumination etc. In this paper, we show that in-situ opportunities can be found and predicted for webcam based heart rate sensing in the workplace environment by analyzing data from unobtrusive sensors in a pervasive manner.

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