Sujit Gujar

Sustainable employment in India by crowdsourcing enterprise tasks

This paper explains how crowdsourcing would constitute for a promising and a successful alternate business model in India, especially at the juncture where the advantages of outsourcing is beginning to fade. The success of this alternate business model depends on the solutions for two challenges -- by taking work to people to leverage large educated population in India and making enough work available for the workforce to work and earn. Though solution to the first challenge is implicitly available through increasing penetration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in India, the second challenge requires enough tasks to be available by enabling business organizations to adopt crowdsourcing. Since enterprise tasks are not readily crowdsourcable owing to security, compliance and contractual reasons, this paper proceeds to describe an end to end system which encompasses technical solutions that could help crowdsourcing business tasks, by tactfully overcoming the existing business constraints. For business tasks, we consider Insurance Claim Form Digitization which is one of the most common tasks taken up by outsourcing enterprises.

An economic model for green cloud

A novel economic model for cloud-based services is presented that: (i) transparently presents energy demands (of services) to the customers in a simple abstract form, called green point, which is understandable to any general user; (ii) provides economic incentives (through dynamic discounts) as motivations for customers to select greener configuration; and (iii) offers service prices to customers such that the profit of cloud vendor is maximized while providing the discounts. Price is differentiated for different classes of customers (e.g. gold, silver, and bronze) and dynamic based on posterior distribution on resource demand considering both current demand and willingness toward green configuration. The model enables a paradigm shift in cloud service offering that provides higher transparency and control knobs to users for greener configuration. Preliminary results indicate higher profit using the proposed model compared to static pricing in existing pay-per-use service offerings.