Loud and Trendy: Crowdsourcing Impressions of Social Ambiance in Popular Indoor Urban Places

New research cutting across architecture, urban studies, and psychology is contextualizing the understanding of urban spaces according to the perceptions of their inhabitants. One fundamental construct that relates place and experience is ambiance, which is defined as "the mood or feeling associated with a particular place". We posit that the systematic study of ambiance dimensions in cities is a new domain for which multimedia research can make pivotal contributions. We present a study to examine how images collected from social media can be used for the crowdsourced characterization of indoor ambiance impressions in popular urban places. We design a crowdsourcing framework to understand suitability of social images as data source to convey place ambiance, to examine what type of images are most suitable to describe ambiance, and to assess how people perceive places socially from the perspective of ambiance along 13 dimensions. Our study is based on 50,000 Foursquare images collected from 300 popular places across six cities worldwide. The results show that reliable estimates of ambiance can be obtained for several of the dimensions. Furthermore, we found that most aggregate impressions of ambiance are similar across popular places in all studied cities. We conclude by presenting a multidisciplinary research agenda for future research in this domain

Understanding customer malling behavior in an urban shopping mall using smartphones

Abstract This paper presents a novel customer malling behavior modeling framework for an urban shopping mall. As an automated computing framework using smartphones, it is designed to provide comprehensive understanding of customer behavior. We prototype the framework in a real-world urban shopping mall. Development consists of three steps; customer data collection, customer trace extraction, and behavior model analysis. We extract customer traces from a collection of 701-hour sensor data from 195 in-situ customers who installed our logging application at Android Market. The practical behavior model is created from the real traces. It has a multi-level structure to provide the holistic understanding of customer behavior from physical movement to service semantics. As far as we know, it is the first work to understand complex customer malling behavior in offline shopping malls

Participatory privacy: Enabling privacy in participatory sensing

Abstract Participatory Sensing is an emerging computing paradigm that enables the distributed collection of data by self-selected participants. It allows the increasing number of mobile phone users to share local knowledge acquired by their sensor-equipped devices, e.g., to monitor temperature, pollution level or consumer pricing information. While research initiatives and prototypes proliferate, their real-world impact is often bounded to comprehensive user participation. If users have no incentive, or feel that their privacy might be endangered, it is likely that they will not participate. In this article, we focus on privacy protection in Participatory Sensing and introduce a suitable privacy-enhanced infrastructure. First, we provide a set of definitions of privacy requirements for both data producers (i.e., users providing sensed information) and consumers (i.e., applications accessing the data). Then, we propose an efficient solution designed for mobile phone users, which incurs very low overhead. Finally, we discuss a number of open problems and possible research directions

Classification and prediction of whereabouts patterns from the Reality Mining dataset

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Automatic identification of relevant places from cellular network data

We present a methodology to automatically identify users\u2019 relevant places from cellular network data.1 In this work we used anonymized Call Detail Record (CDR) comprising information on where and when users access the cellular network. The key idea is to effectively cluster CDRs together and to weigh clusters to determine those associated to frequented places. The approach can identify users\u2019 home and work locations as well as other places (e.g., associated to leisure and night life). We evaluated our approach threefold: (i) on the basis of groundtruth information coming from a fraction of users whose relevant places were known, (ii) by comparing the resulting number of inhabitants of a given city with the number of inhabitants as extracted by the national census. (iii) Via stability analysis to verify the consistency of the extracted results across multiple time periods. Results show the effectiveness of our approach with an average 90% precision and recall