57,434 research outputs found
PS-Sim: A Framework for Scalable Simulation of Participatory Sensing Data
Emergence of smartphone and the participatory sensing (PS) paradigm have
paved the way for a new variant of pervasive computing. In PS, human user
performs sensing tasks and generates notifications, typically in lieu of
incentives. These notifications are real-time, large-volume, and multi-modal,
which are eventually fused by the PS platform to generate a summary. One major
limitation with PS is the sparsity of notifications owing to lack of active
participation, thus inhibiting large scale real-life experiments for the
research community. On the flip side, research community always needs ground
truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed models and algorithms. Most of
the PS applications involve human mobility and report generation following
sensing of any event of interest in the adjacent environment. This work is an
attempt to study and empirically model human participation behavior and event
occurrence distributions through development of a location-sensitive data
simulation framework, called PS-Sim. From extensive experiments it has been
observed that the synthetic data generated by PS-Sim replicates real
participation and event occurrence behaviors in PS applications, which may be
considered for validation purpose in absence of the groundtruth. As a
proof-of-concept, we have used real-life dataset from a vehicular traffic
management application to train the models in PS-Sim and cross-validated the
simulated data with other parts of the same dataset.Comment: Published and Appeared in Proceedings of IEEE International
Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP-2018
Psychological research in the digital age
The smartphone has become an important personal companion in our daily lives. Each time we use the device, we generate data that provides information about ourselves. This data, in turn, is valuable to science because it objectively reflects our everyday behavior and experiences. In this way, smartphones enable research that is closer to everyday life than traditional laboratory experiments and questionnaire-based methods. While data collected with smartphones are increasingly being used in the field of personality psychology, new digital technologies can also be leveraged to collect and analyze large-scale unobtrusively sensed data in other areas of psychological research. This dissertation, therefore, explores the insights that smartphone sensing reveals for psychological research using two examples, situation and affect research, making a twofold research contribution. First, in two empirical studies, different data types of smartphone-sensed
data, such as GPS or phone data, were combined with experience-sampled self-report, and classical questionnaire data to gain valuable insights into individual behavior, thinking, and feeling in everyday life. Second, predictive modeling techniques were applied to analyze the large, high-dimensional data sets collected by smartphones. To gain a deeper understanding of the smartphone data, interpretable variables were extracted from the raw sensing data, and the predictive performance of various machine learning algorithms was compared. In summary, the empirical findings suggest that smartphone data can effectively capture certain situational and behavioral indicators of psychological phenomena in everyday life.
However, in certain research areas such as affect research, smartphone data should only complement, but not completely replace, traditional questionnaire-based data as well as other data sources such as neurophysiological indicators. The dissertation also concludes that the use of smartphone sensor data introduces new difficulties and challenges for psychological research and that traditional methods and perspectives are reaching their limits. The complexity of data collection, processing, and analysis requires established guidelines for study design, interdisciplinary collaboration, and theory-driven research that integrates explanatory and predictive approaches. Accordingly, further research is needed on how machine learning models and other big data methods in psychology can be reconciled with traditional theoretical approaches. Only in this way can we move closer to the ultimate goal of psychology to better understand, explain, and predict human behavior and experiences and their interplay with everyday situations
The role of an omnipresent pocket device : smartphone attendance and the role of user habits
Smartphones are convergent, always-on pocket devices that have taken up an important role in the life of their users. This warrants a closer look into how this medium is used in every-day situations. Are goal-oriented incentives the main drive for smartphone usage, or do habits play a critical role? This study with 481 Belgian smartphone users attempts to describe the precedents of smartphone attendance by validating the model of media attendance (MMA), a social-cognitive theory of uses and gratifications (LaRose & Eastin, 2004). We surprisingly did not find evidence for a significant effect of habits on smartphone usage. We suggest two explanations. First, we suggest some uncertainties concerning the MMA methodology. Second, we suggest a more complex reality in which several habitual use patterns are shaped, dependent on user, context and device. This warrants a more in-depth study, using more advanced measures for smartphone usage and habit strength
Multifaceted companion devices: applying the new model of media attendance to smartphone usage
This study inspects the relationship between outcome expectations, habit strength, and smartphone usage by attempting to validate the new model of media attendance (NMMA) (LaRose and Eastin, 2004) , a social-cognitive theory of uses and gratifications. The fast adoption rate of smartphones, and their inherent characteristics as convergent, always-on, always-connected devices, warrant a closer look into user habitualization of this medium. Using a sample of 481 smartphone users selected from a larger panel, we were able to support the NMMA, although surprisingly no significant effect of habit strength on smartphone usage was found. While some uncertainties connected to the method are noted, this suggests a more complex reality, in which habitualization of a convergent media device does not necessarily implicate a significant rise in usage
Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges
Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten
years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware,
phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more.
As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond
inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the
predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of
the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for
full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena
that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine
learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive
decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop.
Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile
computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure
SensibleSleep: A Bayesian Model for Learning Sleep Patterns from Smartphone Events
We propose a Bayesian model for extracting sleep patterns from smartphone
events. Our method is able to identify individuals' daily sleep periods and
their evolution over time, and provides an estimation of the probability of
sleep and wake transitions. The model is fitted to more than 400 participants
from two different datasets, and we verify the results against ground truth
from dedicated armband sleep trackers. We show that the model is able to
produce reliable sleep estimates with an accuracy of 0.89, both at the
individual and at the collective level. Moreover the Bayesian model is able to
quantify uncertainty and encode prior knowledge about sleep patterns. Compared
with existing smartphone-based systems, our method requires only screen on/off
events, and is therefore much less intrusive in terms of privacy and more
battery-efficient
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