We introduce a system for sensing complex social systems with data collected from 100 mobile phones over the course of 9 months. We demonstrate the ability to use standard Bluetooth-enabled mobile telephones to measure information access and use in different contexts, recognize social patterns in daily user activity, infer relationships, identify socially significant locations, and model organizational rhythms.

/pdf/reality-mining-sensing-complex-social-systems-2gf3rdnw3x.pdf

Reality mining: sensing complex social systems

Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals. This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.

/pdf/inferring-friendship-network-structure-by-using-mobile-phone-1qpewunwmw.pdf

Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data

Location awareness is an important capability for mobile computing. Yet inexpensive, pervasive positioning—a requirement for wide-scale adoption of location-aware computing—has been elusive. We demonstrate a radio beacon-based approach to location, called Place Lab, that can overcome the lack of ubiquity and high-cost found in existing location sensing approaches. Using Place Lab, commodity laptops, PDAs and cell phones estimate their position by listening for the cell IDs of fixed radio beacons, such as wireless access points, and referencing the beacons' positions in a cached database. We present experimental results showing that 802.11 and GSM beacons are sufficiently pervasive in the greater Seattle area to achieve 20-30 meter median accuracy with nearly 100% coverage measured by availability in people's daily lives.

/pdf/place-lab-device-positioning-using-radio-beacons-in-the-wild-3np5z7aajm.pdf

Place lab: device positioning using radio beacons in the wild

The ability to understand and manage social signals of a person we are communicating with is the core of social intelligence. Social intelligence is a facet of human intelligence that has been argued to be indispensable and perhaps the most important for success in life. This paper argues that next-generation computing needs to include the essence of social intelligence - the ability to recognize human social signals and social behaviours like turn taking, politeness, and disagreement - in order to become more effective and more efficient. Although each one of us understands the importance of social signals in everyday life situations, and in spite of recent advances in machine analysis of relevant behavioural cues like blinks, smiles, crossed arms, laughter, and similar, design and development of automated systems for social signal processing (SSP) are rather difficult. This paper surveys the past efforts in solving these problems by a computer, it summarizes the relevant findings in social psychology, and it proposes a set of recommendations for enabling the development of the next generation of socially aware computing.

/pdf/social-signal-processing-2i7inre575.pdf

Social Signal Processing

Examining several sources of data on smartphone use, this paper presents evidence for the popular conjecture that mobile devices are "habit-forming." The form of habits we identified is called a checking habit: brief, repetitive inspection of dynamic content quickly accessible on the device. We describe findings on kinds and frequencies of checking behaviors in three studies. We found that checking habits occasionally spur users to do other things with the device and may increase usage overall. Data from a controlled field experiment show that checking behaviors emerge and are reinforced by informational "rewards" that are very quickly accessible. Qualitative data suggest that although repetitive habitual use is frequent, it is experienced more as an annoyance than an addiction. We conclude that supporting habit-formation is an opportunity for making smartphones more "personal" and "pervasive."

Habits make smartphone use more pervasive

Smart phones are a particularly tempting platform for building context-aware applications because they're programmable and often use well-known operating systems. There's a gap, however, between the operating systems' functionality and the features that application developers need. To fill this gap, we've designed and developed ContextPhone, a software platform consisting of four interconnected modules provided as a set of open source C++ libraries and source code components. ContextPhone runs on off-the-shelf mobile phones using Symbian OS and the Nokia Series 60 Smartphone platform. ContextPhone was developed using an iterative, human-centered design strategy. It thus helps developers more easily create applications that integrate into both existing technologies and users' everyday lives.

/pdf/contextphone-a-prototyping-platform-for-context-aware-mobile-2fbjpnxei6.pdf

ContextPhone: a prototyping platform for context-aware mobile applications

Recent developments in mobile technologies have produced a new kind of device: a programmable mobile phone, the smartphone. In this article, the authors argue that the technological and social char...

http://realitycommons.media.mit.edu/pdfs/Raento09.pdf

Smartphones: An Emerging Tool for Social Scientists

Location-awareness is useful for mobile and pervasive computing. We present a novel adaptive framework for recognizing personally important locations in cellular networks, implementable on a mobile device and usable, e.g., in a presence service. In comparison, most previous work has used service infrastructure for location recognition and the few adaptive frameworks presented have used coordinate-based data. We construct a conceptual framework for the tasks of learning important locations and predicting the next location. We give algorithms for efficient approximation of the ideal concepts, and evaluate them experimentally with real data.

/pdf/adaptive-on-device-location-recognition-2mzkaho3h8.pdf

Adaptive On-Device Location Recognition

Acontextuality of the mobile phone often leads to a caller's uncertainty over a callee's current state, which in turn often hampers mobile collaboration. We are interested in re-designing a Smartphone's contact book to provide cues of the current situations of others. ContextContacts presents several meaningful, automatically communicated situation cues of trusted others. Its interaction design follows social psychological findings on how people make social attributions based on impoverished cues, on how self-disclosure of cues is progressively and interactionally managed, and on how mobility affects interaction through cues. We argue how our design choices support mobile communication decisions and group coordinations by promoting awareness. As a result, the design is very minimal and integrated, in an "unremarkable" manner, to previously learned usage patterns with the phone. First laboratory and field evaluations indicate important boundary conditions for and promising avenues toward more useful and enjoyable mobile awareness applications.

https://interruptions.net/literature/Oulasvirta-MobileHCI05-p167-oulasvirta.pdf

ContextContacts: re-designing SmartPhone's contact book to support mobile awareness and collaboration

Mobile awareness systems provide user-controlled and automatic, sensor-derived cues of other users' situations and in that way attempt to facilitate group practices and provide opportunities for social interaction. We are interested in investigating how users interpret these cues as a situation, action, or intention of a remote person and then act on them in everyday social interactions. Three field trials utilizing A-B intervention research methodology were conducted with three types of teenager groups (N = 15, total days = 243). Each trial had a slightly different variation of Context Contacts-a smartphone-based multicue mobile awareness system. We report on several analyses on how the cues were accessed, viewed, monitored, inferred, and acted on.

Mika Raento

Papers

ContextPhone: a prototyping platform for context-aware mobile applications

Smartphones: An Emerging Tool for Social Scientists

Adaptive On-Device Location Recognition

ContextContacts: re-designing SmartPhone's contact book to support mobile awareness and collaboration

Interpreting and acting on mobile awareness cues