In the past years we have witnessed the emergence of the new discipline of computational social science, which promotes a new data-driven and computation-based approach to social sciences. In this article we discuss how the availability of new technologies such as online social media and mobile smartphones has allowed researchers to passively collect human behavioral data at a scale and a level of granularity that were just unthinkable some years ago. We also discuss how these digital traces can then be used to prove (or disprove) existing theories and develop new models of human behavior.
The research on the efforts of combining human and machine intelligence has a long history. With the development of mobile sensing and mobile Internet techniques, a new sensing paradigm called Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), which leverages the power of citizens for large-scale sensing has become popular in recent years. As an evolution of participatory sensing, MCS has two unique features: (1) it involves both implicit and explicit participation; (2) MCS collects data from two user-participant data sources: mobile social networks and mobile sensing. This paper presents the literary history of MCS…
With the development of mobile sensing and mobile social networking techniques, Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing (MCSC), which leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data for large-scale sensing, has become a leading paradigm. Built on top of the participatory sensing vision, MCSC has two characterizing features: (1) it leverages heterogeneous crowdsourced data from two data sources: participatory sensing and participatory social media; and (2) it presents the fusion of human and machine intelligence (HMI) in both the sensing and computing process. This paper characterizes the unique features …
Understanding food consumption patterns and contexts using mobile sensing is fundamental to build mobile health applications that require minimal user interaction to generate mobile food diaries. Many available mobile food diaries, both commercial and in research, heavily rely on self-reports, and this dependency limits the long term adoption of these apps by people. The social context of eating (alone, with friends, with family, with a partner, etc.) is an important self-reported feature that influences aspects such as food type, psychological state while eating, and the amount of food, accor…
Previously, crowdsourcing experiments in surveillance of crop diseases and pest have been trialed as small scale community sensing campaigns with select cohort of smallholder farmers, extension and experts. While those pilots have demonstrated the viability of community sensing with mobile phones to collect massive amounts of real-time data all year round, to compliment low-resourced agricultural expert surveys, they are limited in generalising ideas for scaled implementations of a community sensing system with farmer communities. This work presents a case of scaled deployment of the mobile ad…
We outline a contact-tracing strategy based on proximity sensing using mobile devices. We discuss what an ideal system should look like and what it can do. We show that, when adopted sufficiently broadly, such a contact-tracing strategy can bring COVID-19 under complete control, end the need of social distancing, and return the society to full normalcy. We also review some of the challenges faced by the current generation of proximity-sensing technologies, including Bluetooth Low Energy used by phones, and consider both interim and longer-term solutions. Our main contribution is that we reason…
We demonstrate a novel mobile application called GangaWatch that makes water pollution data usable and accessible focusing on one of the most polluted river basins in the world. It is intended to engage common public who want to see water condition and safe limits, and their relevance based on different purposes. The data is a combination of old data determined from lab tests on physical samples and new data from real time sensors collected from Ganga basin. The platform is open for contribution from others, the data is also available for reuse via public APIs, and it has already been used to …
Our research presents the case-study of a mobile phone based, voice-driven platform - Mobile Vaani, established with a goal to empower poor and marginalized communities to create their own local media. In this paper, we derive a comprehensive theory of change for Mobile Vaani from data gathered using the Most Significant Change technique. This paper contributes towards formulating a theory of change for technology-driven community media platforms which can be adapted to other ICTD interventions too.
Data credibility is a crucial issue in mobile crowd sensing (MCS) and, more generally, people-centric Internet of Things (IoT). Prior work takes approaches such as incentive mechanism design and data mining to address this issue, while overlooking the power of crowds itself, which we exploit in this paper. In particular, we propose a cross validation approach which seeks a validating crowd to verify the data credibility of the original sensing crowd, and uses the verification result to reshape the original sensing dataset into a more credible posterior belief of the ground truth. Following thi…
The relevance of mobile working is steadily increasing. Based on new mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) and their innovative functionalities, an increasing amount of data is being made available ubiquitously. As a result, the growing diffusion of smartphones offers new potential for enterprises. Current mobile devices and related mobile networks have reached a high level of maturity. Thus, the organizational aspects of mobile work have become a focal point of interest for enterprises as well as for academics. This research article addresses the question: How does context influence the choice of…
The always increasing mobile connectivity affects every aspect of our daily lives, including how and when we keep ourselves informed and consult news media. By studying a DPI (deep packet inspection) dataset, provided by one of the major Chilean telecommunication companies, we investigate how different cohorts of the population of Santiago De Chile consume news media content through their smartphones. We find that some socio-demographic attributes are highly associated to specific news media consumption patterns. In particular, education and age play a significant role in shaping the consumers…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Mobile Sensing Apps have been widely used as a practical approach to collect behavioral and health-related information from individuals and provide timely intervention to promote health and well-beings, such as mental health and chronic cares. As the objectives of mobile sensing could be either \emph{(a) personalized medicine for individuals} or \emph{(b) public health for populations}, in this work we review the design of these mobile sensing apps, and propose to categorize the design of these apps/systems in two paradigms -- \emph{(i) Personal Sensing} and \emph{(ii) Crowd Sensing} paradigms…
Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric problems affecting both children and adults. However, tools to effectively monitor and manage anxiety are lacking, and comparatively limited research has been applied to addressing the unique challenges around anxiety. Leveraging passive and unobtrusive data collection from smartphones could be a viable alternative to classical methods, allowing for real-time mental health surveillance and disease management. This paper presents eWellness, an experimental mobile application designed to track a full-suite of sensor and user-log data off…
The Role of Mobile and Social Media Services in Enhancing Freedom of Expression: Opportunities, Challenges, and Prospects for Local Platform Development in Uganda's Digital Ecosystem
Mood inference with mobile sensing data has been studied in ubicomp literature over the last decade. This inference enables context-aware and personalized user experiences in general mobile apps and valuable feedback and interventions in mobile health apps. However, even though model generalization issues have been highlighted in many studies, the focus has always been on improving the accuracies of models using different sensing modalities and machine learning techniques, with datasets collected in homogeneous populations. In contrast, less attention has been given to studying the performance…
PathCheck Foundation（PathCheck基金会）；MIT Media Lab（麻省理工学院媒体实验室）
As we await a vaccine, social-distancing via efficient contact tracing has emerged as the primary health strategy to dampen the spread of COVID-19. To enable efficient digital contact tracing, we present a novel system to estimate pair-wise individual proximity, via a joint model of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals with other on-device sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope). We explore multiple ways of interpreting the sensor data stream (time-series, histogram, etc) and use several statistical and deep learning methods to learn representations for sensing proximity. We report the …
Mobile Phone based Participatory Sensing (MPPS) systems involve a community of users sending personal information and participating in autonomous sensing through their mobile phones. Sensed data can also be obtained from external sensing devices that can communicate wirelessly to the phone. We have developed the tourist subjective data collection system with Android smartphone. The tourist can tweet the information of sightseeing spots by using the application. The application can determine the filtering rules to provide the important information of sightseeing spot. The rules are automaticall…
Among the general population, students are especially sensitive to social media and smartphones because of their pervasiveness. Several studies have shown that there is a negative correlation between social media and academic performance since they can lead to behaviors that hurt students' careers, e.g., addictedness. However, these studies either focus on smartphones and social media addictedness or rely on surveys, which only provide approximate estimates. We propose to bridge this gap by i) parametrizing social media usage and academic performance, and ii) combining smartphones and time dia…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院洞察数据分析中心）；Institute of Systems Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学系统工程研究所）；China Telecom at Macau（中国电信（澳门））；Helen and John C. Hartmann Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院海伦与约翰·C·哈特曼电气与计算机工程系）
Data volume grows explosively with the proliferation of powerful smartphones and innovative mobile applications. The ability to accurately and extensively monitor and analyze these data is necessary. Much concern in mobile data analysis is related to human beings and their behaviours. Due to the potential value that lies behind these massive data, there have been different proposed approaches for understanding corresponding patterns. To that end, monitoring people's interactions, whether counting them at fixed locations or tracking them by generating origin-destination matrices is crucial. The…
