UrbanDiary - a tracking project

This working paper investigates aspects of time in an urban environment, specifically the cycles and routines of everyday life in the city. As part of the UrbanDiary project (urbantick.blogspot.com), we explore a preliminary study to trace citizen’s spatial habits in individual movement utilising GPS devices with the aim of capturing the beat and rhythm of the city. The data collected includes time and location, to visualise individual activity, along with a series of personal statements on how individuals “use” and experience the city. In this paper, the intent is to explore the context of the UrbanDiary project as well as examine the methodology and technical aspects of tracking with a focus on the comparison of different visualisation techniques. We conclude with a visualisation of the collected data, specifically where the aspect of time is developed and explored so that we might outline a new approach to visualising the city in the sense of a collective, constantly renewed space

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

A conceptual framework for studying collective reactions to events in location-based social media

Events are a core concept of spatial information, but location-based social media (LBSM) provide information on reactions to events. Individuals have varied degrees of agency in initiating, reacting to or modifying the course of events, and reactions include observations of occurrence, expressions containing sentiment or emotions, or a call to action. Key characteristics of reactions include referent events and information about who reacted, when, where and how. Collective reactions are composed of multiple individual reactions sharing common referents. They can be characterized according to the following dimensions: spatial, temporal, social, thematic and interlinkage. We present a conceptual framework, which allows characterization and comparison of collective reactions. For a thematically well-defined class of event such as storms, we can explore differences and similarities in collective attribution of meaning across space and time. Other events may have very complex spatio-temporal signatures (e.g. political processes such as Brexit or elections), which can be decomposed into series of individual events (e.g. a temporal window around the result of a vote). The purpose of our framework is to explore ways in which collective reactions to events in LBSM can be described and underpin the development of methods for analysing and understanding collective reactions to events

A Human-centric Perspective on Digital Consenting: The Case of GAFAM

According to different legal frameworks such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an end-user's consent constitutes one of the well-known legal bases for personal data processing. However, research has indicated that the majority of end-users have difficulty in understanding what they are consenting to in the digital world. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that marginalized people are confronted with even more difficulties when dealing with their own digital privacy. In this research, we use an enactivist perspective from cognitive science to develop a basic human-centric framework for digital consenting. We argue that the action of consenting is a sociocognitive action and includes cognitive, collective, and contextual aspects. Based on the developed theoretical framework, we present our qualitative evaluation of the consent-obtaining mechanisms implemented and used by the five big tech companies, i.e. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM). The evaluation shows that these companies have failed in their efforts to empower end-users by considering the human-centric aspects of the action of consenting. We use this approach to argue that their consent-obtaining mechanisms violate principles of fairness, accountability and transparency. We then suggest that our approach may raise doubts about the lawfulness of the obtained consent—particularly considering the basic requirements of lawful consent within the legal framework of the GDPR

Identifying manifolds underlying group motion in Vicsek agents

Collective motion of animal groups often undergoes changes due to perturbations. In a topological sense, we describe these changes as switching between low-dimensional embedding manifolds underlying a group of evolving agents. To characterize such manifolds, first we introduce a simple mapping of agents between time-steps. Then, we construct a novel metric which is susceptible to variations in the collective motion, thus revealing distinct underlying manifolds. The method is validated through three sample scenarios simulated using a Vicsek model, namely switching of speed, coordination, and structure of a group. Combined with a dimensionality reduction technique that is used to infer the dimensionality of the embedding manifold, this approach provides an effective model-free framework for the analysis of collective behavior across animal species.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, journal articl