Understanding, Discovering, and Mitigating Habitual Smartphone Use in Young Adults

People, especially young adults, often use their smartphones out of habit: They compulsively browse social networks, check emails, and play video-games with little or no awareness at all. While previous studies analyzed this phenomena qualitatively, e.g., by showing that users perceive it as meaningless and addictive, yet our understanding of how to discover smartphone habits and mitigate their disruptive effects is limited. Being able to automatically assess habitual smartphone use, in particular, might have different applications, e.g., to design better “digital wellbeing” solutions for mitigating meaningless habitual use. To close this gap, we first define a data analytic methodology based on clustering and association rules mining to automatically discover complex smartphone habits from mobile usage data. We assess the methodology over more than 130,000 phone usage sessions collected from users aged between 16 and 33, and we show evidence that smartphone habits of young adults can be characterized by various types of links between contextual situations and usage sessions, which are highly diversified and differently perceived across users. We then apply the proposed methodology in Socialize, a digital wellbeing app that (i) monitors habitual smartphone behaviors in real time and (ii) uses proactive notifications and just-in-time reminders to encourage users to avoid any identified smartphone habits they consider as meaningless. An in-the-wild study with 20 users (ages 19–31) demonstrates that Socialize can assist young adults in better controlling their smartphone usage with a significant reduction of their unwanted smartphone habits

Optimizing Interactive Systems via Data-Driven Objectives

Effective optimization is essential for real-world interactive systems to provide a satisfactory user experience in response to changing user behavior. However, it is often challenging to find an objective to optimize for interactive systems (e.g., policy learning in task-oriented dialog systems). Generally, such objectives are manually crafted and rarely capture complex user needs in an accurate manner. We propose an approach that infers the objective directly from observed user interactions. These inferences can be made regardless of prior knowledge and across different types of user behavior. We introduce Interactive System Optimizer (ISO), a novel algorithm that uses these inferred objectives for optimization. Our main contribution is a new general principled approach to optimizing interactive systems using data-driven objectives. We demonstrate the high effectiveness of ISO over several simulations.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.0630

Information Diffusion and Social Influence in Online Networks.

The explosive growth of online social systems has changed how individuals consume and disseminate information. In this thesis, we conduct large-scale observational and experimental studies that allow us to determine the role that social networks play in information diffusion online, and the factors that mediate this influence. We first examine the adoption of user-created content in a virtual world, and find that social transmission appears to play a prominent role in the adoption of content. Ultimately, we are faced with a critical problem that underlies all contemporary empirical research on social influence: how do we measure whether individuals in a network influence one another, when the basis for their interaction rests upon commonalities that are predictive of their future behavior? We use two coupled experiments to address this question. In our first experiment, we randomize exposure to social signals about friends' information sharing behavior to determine the causal effect of networks on diffusion among 253 million subjects in situ. Our second experiment further tests how social information affects individual sharing decisions when viewing content. Finally, this thesis concludes with a study that examines how individuals allocate attention across their network of contacts, which has implications for influence and information diversity in networks.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89838/1/ebakshy_1.pd

Diverse Contributions to Implicit Human-Computer Interaction

Cuando las personas interactúan con los ordenadores, hay mucha información que no se proporciona a propósito. Mediante el estudio de estas interacciones implícitas es posible entender qué características de la interfaz de usuario son beneficiosas (o no), derivando así en implicaciones para el diseño de futuros sistemas interactivos. La principal ventaja de aprovechar datos implícitos del usuario en aplicaciones informáticas es que cualquier interacción con el sistema puede contribuir a mejorar su utilidad. Además, dichos datos eliminan el coste de tener que interrumpir al usuario para que envíe información explícitamente sobre un tema que en principio no tiene por qué guardar relación con la intención de utilizar el sistema. Por el contrario, en ocasiones las interacciones implícitas no proporcionan datos claros y concretos. Por ello, hay que prestar especial atención a la manera de gestionar esta fuente de información. El propósito de esta investigación es doble: 1) aplicar una nueva visión tanto al diseño como al desarrollo de aplicaciones que puedan reaccionar consecuentemente a las interacciones implícitas del usuario, y 2) proporcionar una serie de metodologías para la evaluación de dichos sistemas interactivos. Cinco escenarios sirven para ilustrar la viabilidad y la adecuación del marco de trabajo de la tesis. Resultados empíricos con usuarios reales demuestran que aprovechar la interacción implícita es un medio tanto adecuado como conveniente para mejorar de múltiples maneras los sistemas interactivos.Leiva Torres, LA. (2012). Diverse Contributions to Implicit Human-Computer Interaction [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17803Palanci

Quantifying, Modeling and Managing How People Interact with Visualizations on the Web

The growing number of interactive visualizations on the web has made it possible for the general public to access data and insights that were once only available to domain experts. At the same time, this rise has yielded new challenges for visualization creators, who must now understand and engage a growing and diverse audience. To bridge this gap between creators and audiences, we explore and evaluate components of a design-feedback loop that would enable visualization creators to better accommodate their audiences as they explore the visualizations. In this dissertation, we approach this goal by quantifying, modeling and creating tools that manage people’s open-ended explorations of visualizations on the web. In particular, we: 1. Quantify the effects of design alternatives on people’s interaction patterns in visualizations. We define and evaluate two techniques: HindSight (encoding a user’s interaction history) and text-based search, where controlled experiments suggest that design details can significantly modulate the interaction patterns we observe from participants using a given visualization. 2. Develop new metrics that characterize facets of people’s exploration processes. Specifically, we derive expressive metrics describing interaction patterns such as exploration uniqueness, and use Bayesian inference to model distributional effects on interaction behavior. Our results show that these metrics capture novel patterns in people’s interactions with visualizations. 3. Create tools that manage and analyze an audience’s interaction data for a given visualization. We develop a prototype tool, ReVisIt, that visualizes an audience’s interactions with a given visualization. Through an interview study with visualization creators, we found that ReVisIt make creators aware of individual and overall trends in their audiences’ interaction patterns. By establishing some of the core elements of a design-feedback loop for visualization creators, the results in this research may have a tangible impact on the future of publishing interactive visualizations on the web. Equipped with techniques, metrics, and tools that realize an initial feedback loop, creators are better able to understand the behavior and user needs, and thus create visualizations that make data and insights more accessible to the diverse audiences on the web

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

EXPLORING BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS IN COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Many phenomenons in real world can be characterized as complex adaptive systems (CAS). We are surrounded with a huge number of communicating and interacting agents. Some of those agents may be capable of learning and adapting to new situation, trying to achieve their goals. E-commerce, social media, cloud computing, transportation network and real-time ride sharing, supply chain are a few examples of CAS. These are the systems which surround us in every day’s life, and naturally we want to make sense of those systems and optimize systems’ behavior or optimize our behavior around those systems. Given the complexity of these systems, we want to find a set of simplified patterns out of the seeming chaos of interactions in a CAS, and provide more manageable means of analysis for such systems. In my thesis I consider a few example problems from different domains: modeling human behavior during fire evacuation, detection of notable transitions in data streams, modeling finite resource sharing on a computational cluster with many clients, and predicting buyer behavior on the marketplace. These (and other) seemingly different problems demonstrate one important similarity: complex semi-repetitive or semi-similar behavior. This semi-repetitive behavior poses a challenge to model such processes. This challenge comes for two major reasons: 1 ) state-space explosion and sparsity of data 2 ) critical transitions and precision of process modeling I show, that the analysis of smilingly different CAS coming from different domains, can be performed by following the same recipe

"Sometimes it's like putting the track in front of the rushing train": Having to be 'on call' for work limits the temporal flexibility of crowdworkers

Research suggests that the temporal flexibility advertised to crowdworkers by crowdsourcing platforms is limited by both client-imposed constraints (e.g., strict completion times) and crowdworkers' tooling practices (e.g., multitasking). In this paper, we explore an additional contributor to workers' limited temporal flexibility: the design of crowdsourcing platforms, namely requiring crowdworkers to be `on call' for work. We conducted two studies to investigate the impact of having to be `on call' on workers' schedule control and job control. We find that being `on call' impacted: (1) participants' ability to schedule their time and stick to planned work hours, and (2) the pace at which participants worked and took breaks. The results of the two studies suggest that the `on-demand' nature of crowdsourcing platforms can limit workers' temporal flexibility by reducing schedule control and job control. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the results for: (a) crowdworkers, (b) crowdsourcing platforms, and (c) the wider platform economy

Crowdsensed Mobile Data Analytics

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are nowadays an essential part of everyday life. They are used worldwide and across all the demographic groups - they can be utilized for multiple functionalities, including but not limited to communications, game playing, social interactions, maps and navigation, leisure, work, and education. With a large on-device sensor base, mobile devices provide a rich source of data. Understanding how these devices are used help us also to increase the knowledge of people's everyday habits, needs, and rituals. Data collection and analysis can thus be utilized in different recommendation and feedback systems that further increase usage experience of the smart devices. Crowdsensed computing describes a paradigm where multiple autonomous devices are used together to collect large-scale data. In the case of smartphones, this kind of data can include running and installed applications, different system settings, such as network connection and screen brightness, and various subsystem variables, such as CPU and memory usage. In addition to the autonomous data collection, user questionnaires can be used to provide a wider view to the user community. To understand smartphone usage as a whole, different procedures are needed for cleaning missing and misleading values and preprocessing information from various sets of variables. Analyzing large-scale data sets - rising in size to terabytes - requires understanding of different Big Data management tools, distributed computing environments, and efficient algorithms to perform suitable data analysis and machine learning tasks. Together, these procedures and methodologies aim to provide actionable feedback, such as recommendations and visualizations, for the benefit of smartphone users, researchers, and application development. This thesis provides an approach to a large-scale crowdsensed mobile analytics. First, this thesis describes procedures for cleaning and preprocessing mobile data collected from real-life conditions, such as current system settings and running applications. It shows how interdependencies between different data items are important to consider when analyzing the smartphone system state as a whole. Second, this thesis provides suitable distributed machine learning and statistical analysis methods for analyzing large-scale mobile data. The algorithms, such as the decision tree-based classification and recommendation system, and information analysis methods presented in this thesis, are implemented in the distributed cloud-computing environment Apache Spark. Third, this thesis provides approaches to generate actionable feedback, such as energy consumption and application recommendations, which can be utilized in the mobile devices themselves or when understanding large crowds of smartphone users. The application areas especially covered in this thesis are smartphone energy consumption analysis in the case of system settings and subsystem variables, trend-based application recommendation system, and analysis of demographic, geographic, and cultural factors in smartphone usage.Erilaiset älylaitteet, erityisesti älypuhelimet, ovat muodostuneet oleelliseksi osaksi arkipäivän elektroniikan käyttöä. Älypuhelinten käyttö ei rajoitu perinteisiin kommunikaatiotoimintoihin, vaan niillä on voitu korvata monia muita laitteita ja palveluita, kuten pelit, kartat, sosiaalinen media, ja monet Internetin kautta saavutettavat palvelut. Koska laitteita on saatavilla monissa eri hintaluokissa, ne ovat pääsääntöisesti lähes kaikkien saatavilla, myös maailmanlaajuisesti. Aina mukana kannettavan älypuhelimen käyttö tuottaa runsaasti henkilökohtaista tietoa, mikä tarjoaa mahdollisuuden analysoida käyttäjien päivittäistä elämää. Henkilökohtaisia suosituksia hyödyntäen käyttäjille voidaan tarjota tietoa, joka auttaa parantamaan käyttäjäkokemusta ja laajentamaan älylaitteen käyttömahdollisuuksia. Joukkoistava havainnointi tarkoittaa tiedonkeräysmenetelmää, jossa useat erilliset laitteet osallistuvat automaattisesti suuremman datajoukon kartuttamiseen. Puhelinlaitteista tällaista kerättävää dataa ovat muun muassa tieto suorituksessa olevista ja asennetuista sovelluksista, erilaiset järjestelmäasetukset, kuten verkkoyhteystiedot ja näytön kirkkaus, sekä lukuisat muut järjestelmätason parametrit, kuten suorittimen ja muistin käyttö. Automaattista datan keräystä voidaan täydentää käyttäjille lähetettävillä kyselyillä. Älypuhelimista kerättävän datan analysoinnissa on monia vaiheita, jotka tekevät koko prosessista haasteellisen. Automaattisesti kerättyyn dataan päätyy helposti virheitä ja puutteita, joiden käsittely on hallittava. Datan määrä kasvaa helposti teratavuluokkaan, jolloin analysointiin tarvitaan suurten datajoukkojen käsittelyyn sopivia hajautettuja laskenta-alustoja ja algoritmeja. Hyödyllisten suositusten generoimiseksi puhelinlaitteisiin liittyvän analyysin halutaan usein olevan reaaliaikaista, mikä asettaa lisää haasteita analyysin suorituskyvylle. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitetään menetelmiä joukkoistetusti havainnoidun älypuhelindatan käsittelemiseksi tehokkaasti ja hyödyllistä informaatiota tuottaen. Väitöskirjan alussa kuvaillaan älypuhelindatan keräämistä prosessina, datan esikäsittelyä ja siistimistä hyödylliseen ja käsiteltävään muotoon. Väitöskirja esittää, että puhelinlaitteen tila tulisi ottaa huomioon kokonaisuutena, jossa useat eri tekijät, kuten samanaikaisesti suoritettavat sovellukset ja toisiinsa liittyvät järjestelmäasetukset vaikuttavat toisiinsa. Tämän jälkeen väitöskirjassa esitetään joitakin sopivia tilastollisen analyysin ja koneoppimisen menetelmiä, joita väitöskirjan tutkimuksessa on käytetty älypuhelindatan analysointiin. Kaikki näistä menetelmistä ovat suoritettavissa hajautetussa laskentaympäristössä ja toteutettu Apache Spark -järjestelmää käyttäen. Lopuksi väitöskirja näyttää, kuinka analyysiä sovelletaan käytännössä käyttäjille suunnatun palautteen ja suositusten generointiin. Päähuomion saavat puhelinlaitteiden energiankulutuksen analysointi, puhelinsovellusten trendien havainnointi, ja erilaisten kulttuuristen ja sosioekonomisten taustatekijöiden huomiointi mobiilikäyttöä tutkittaessa