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Push notifications keep user informed and engaged with the events around the mobile applications. However not all the notifications are of the same importance level to the user. We explore how mobile notifications are regarded as increasing number of applications are adopting notification services. We logged notification management traces from 10 individuals for 15 days to understand how they perceived mobile notifications and their importance, accompanying our results with semistructured interviews.

Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) has been extensively studied in terms of its quality and completeness in the past. However, little attention is given to understanding what factors, beyond individuals' expertise, contribute to the success of VGI. In this chapter we ask whether society and its characteristics such as socio-economic factors have an impact on what part of the physical world is being digitally mapped. This question is necessary, so to understand where crowdsourced map information can be relied upon (and crucially where not), with direct implications on the design of applications that rely on having complete and unbiased map knowledge. To answer the above questions, we study over 6 years of crowd-sourced contributions to OpenStreetMap (OSM) a successful example of the VGI paradigm. We measure the positional and thematic accuracy as well as completeness of this information and quantify the role of society on the state of this digital production. Finally we quantify the effect of social engagement as a method of intervention for improving users' participation.

Crowdsourcing has become a successful paradigm in the past decade, as Web 2.0 users have taken a more active role in producing content as well as consuming it. Recently this paradigm has broadened to incorporate ubiquitous applications, in which the smart-phone users contribute information about their surrounding, thus providing a collective knowledge about the physical world. However the acceptance and openness of such applications has made it easy to contribute poor quality content. Various solutions have been proposed for the Web-based domain, to assist with monitoring and filtering poor quality content, but these methods fall short when applied to ubiquitous crowdsourcing, where the task of collecting information has to be performed continuously and in real-time, by an always changing crowd. In this paper we discuss the challenges for quality control in ubiquitous crowdsorucing and propose a novel technique that reasons on users mobility patterns and quality of their past contributions to estimate user's credibility.