Leveraging Mobile App Classification and User Context Information for Improving Recommendation Systems

Mobile apps play a significant role in current online environments where there is an overwhelming supply of information. Although mobile apps are part of our daily routine, searching and finding mobile apps is becoming a nontrivial task due to the current volume, velocity and variety of information. Therefore, app recommender systems provide users’ desired apps based on their preferences. However, current recommender systems and their underlying techniques are limited in effectively leveraging app classification schemes and context information. In this thesis, I attempt to address this gap by proposing a text analytics framework for mobile app recommendation by leveraging an app classification scheme that incorporates the needs of users as well as the complexity of the user-item-context information in mobile app usage pattern. In this recommendation framework, I adopt and empirically test an app classification scheme based on textual information about mobile apps using data from Google Play store. In addition, I demonstrate how context information such as user social media status can be matched with app classification categories using tree-based and rule-based prediction algorithms. Methodology wise, my research attempts to show the feasibility of textual data analysis in profiling apps based on app descriptions and other structured attributes, as well as explore mechanisms for matching user preferences and context information with app usage categories. Practically, the proposed text analytics framework can allow app developers reach a wider usage base through better understanding of user motivation and context information

On the Promotion of the Social Web Intelligence

Given the ever-growing information generated through various online social outlets, analytical research on social media has intensified in the past few years from all walks of life. In particular, works on social Web intelligence foster and benefit from the wisdom of the crowds and attempt to derive actionable information from such data. In the form of collective intelligence, crowds gather together and contribute to solving problems that may be difficult or impossible to solve by individuals and single computers. In addition, the consumer insight revealed from social footprints can be leveraged to build powerful business intelligence tools, enabling efficient and effective decision-making processes. This dissertation is broadly concerned with the intelligence that can emerge from the social Web platforms. In particular, the two phenomena of social privacy and online persuasion are identified as the two pillars of the social Web intelligence, studying which is essential in the promotion and advancement of both collective and business intelligence. The first part of the dissertation is focused on the phenomenon of social privacy. This work is mainly motivated by the privacy dichotomy problem. Users often face difficulties specifying privacy policies that are consistent with their actual privacy concerns and attitudes. As such, before making use of social data, it is imperative to employ multiple safeguards beyond the current privacy settings of users. As a possible solution, we utilize user social footprints to detect their privacy preferences automatically. An unsupervised collaborative filtering approach is proposed to characterize the attributes of publicly available accounts that are intended to be private. Unlike the majority of earlier studies, a variety of social data types is taken into account, including the social context, the published content, as well as the profile attributes of users. Our approach can provide support in making an informed decision whether to exploit one\u27s publicly available data to draw intelligence. With the aim of gaining insight into the strategies behind online persuasion, the second part of the dissertation studies written comments in online deliberations. Specifically, we explore different dimensions of the language, the temporal aspects of the communication, as well as the attributes of the participating users to understand what makes people change their beliefs. In addition, we investigate the factors that are perceived to be the reasons behind persuasion by the users. We link our findings to traditional persuasion research, hoping to uncover when and how they apply to online persuasion. A set of rhetorical relations is known to be of importance in persuasive discourse. We further study the automatic identification and disambiguation of such rhetorical relations, aiming to take a step closer towards automatic analysis of online persuasion. Finally, a small proof of concept tool is presented, showing the value of our persuasion and rhetoric studies

Mining Behavioral Patterns from Mobile Big Data

Mobile devices connected to the Internet are a ubiquitous platform that can easily record a large amount of data describing human behavior. Specifically, the data collected from mobile devices --- referred to as mobile big data reveal important social and economic information. Therefore, analyzing mobile big data is valuable for several stakeholders, ranging from smartphone manufacturers to network operators and app developers. This thesis aims to discover and understand behavioral patterns from mobile big data based on large real-world datasets. Specifically, this thesis reveals patterns from three domains: people, time, and location. First, we explore mobile big data from the people domain and propose a framework to discover users' daily activity patterns from their mobile app usage. By applying the framework to a real-world dataset consisting of 653,092 users, we successfully extract five common patterns among millions of people, including commuting, pervasive socializing, nightly entertainment, afternoon reading, and nightly socializing. Second, still from the people domain, we derive group health conditions by using their smartphone usage data. In particular, we collect mobile usage records of 452 users in North America. We then demonstrate the potential for inferring group health conditions (i.e., COVID-19 outbreak stages) by leveraging less privacy-sensitive smartphone data, including CPU usage, memory usage, and network connections. Third, we mine the behavior patterns from the time domain. We reveal the evolution of mobile app usage by conducting a longitudinal study on 1,465 users from 2012 to 2017. The results show that users' app usage significantly changes over time. However, the evolution in app-category usage and individual app usage are different in terms of popularity distribution, usage diversity, and correlations. Last, with respect to the location domain, we leverage city-scale spatiotemporal mobile app usage data to reveal urban land usage patterns. We prove the strong correlation between mobile usage behavior and location features, which brings a new angle to urban analytics.Internetiin kytketyt mobiililaitteet ovat kaikkialla läsnä oleva alusta, joka voi helposti tallentaa suuren määrän tietoja, jotka kuvaavat ihmisen käyttäytymistä. Erityisesti mobiililaitteista kerätyt tiedot, joita kutsutaan mobiiliksi massadataksi (big data), paljastavat tärkeitä sosiaalisia ja taloudellisia tietoja. Siksi mobiilin massadatan analysointi on arvokasta useille sidosryhmille älypuhelinvalmistajista verkko-operaattoreihin ja sovelluskehittäjiin. Tämän väitöskirjan tavoitteena on löytää ja ymmärtää käyttäytymismalleja mobiilista massadatasta, joka perustuu suuriin reaalimaailman tietojoukkoihin. Erityisesti tämä väitöskirja tuottaa malleja kolmelta eri alueelta: ihmisiin, aikaan ja sijaintiin liittyen. Ensinnäkin tutkimme mobiilia massadataa ihmisiin liittyen ja ehdotamme viitekehystä, jonka avulla voidaan löytää käyttäjien päivittäisiä toimintamalleja heidän mobiilisovellustensa käytön perusteella. Soveltamalla tätä viitekehystä tosielämän tietojoukkoon, joka koostuu 653 092 käyttäjästä, löysimme onnistuneesti viisi yleistä mallia miljoonien ihmisten tiedoista, joihin kuuluivat mm. tiedot työmatkoista, sosiaalisista kontakteista, yöllisestä viihteestä, iltapäivän lukemisesta ja yöllisestä seurustelusta. Toiseksi, edelleen ihmisiin liittyen, johdamme tietoja ryhmien terveysolosuhteista käyttämällä heidän älypuhelintensa käyttötietoja. Keräsimme erityisesti 452 käyttäjän mobiilikäyttötietoja Pohjois-Amerikassa. Sitten osoitamme, että on mahdollista päätellä ryhmän terveysolosuhteet (eli COVID-19-epidemiavaiheet) hyödyntämällä vähemmän yksityisyyden kannalta arkoja älypuhelintietoja, mukaan lukien suorittimen käyttö, muistin käyttö ja verkkoyhteydet. Kolmanneksi louhimme käyttäytymismalleja aikaan liittyen. Paljastamme mobiilisovellusten käytön kehityksen tekemällä pitkittäistutkimuksen 1 465 käyttäjälle vuosina 2012–2017. Tulokset osoittavat, että käyttäjien sovellusten käyttö muuttuu merkittävästi ajan myötä. Sovellusluokan käytön ja yksittäisten sovellusten käytön kehitys on kuitenkin erilainen niiden suosion jakautumisen, käytön moninaisuuden ja korrelaatioiden suhteen. Lopuksi liittyen sijaintitietoihin hyödynnämme spatiotemporaalisten mobiilisovellusten käyttötietoja suurkaupunkitasolla paljastaaksemme kaupunkien maankäyttömallit. Todistamme vahvan korrelaation mobiililaitteiden käyttöön liittyvän käyttäytymisen ja sijaintiominaisuuksien välillä, mikä tuottaa uuden näkökulman kaupunkianalytiikkaan

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202

Large-scale medical image annotation with quality-controlled crowdsourcing

Accurate annotations of medical images are essential for various clinical applications. The remarkable advances in machine learning, especially deep learning based techniques, show great potential for automatic image segmentation. However, these solutions require a huge amount of accurately annotated reference data for training. Especially in the domain of medical image analysis, the availability of domain experts for reference data generation is becoming a major bottleneck for machine learning applications. In this context, crowdsourcing has gained increasing attention as a tool for low-cost and large-scale data annotation. As a method to outsource cognitive tasks to anonymous non-expert workers over the internet, it has evolved into a valuable tool for data annotation in various research fields. Major challenges in crowdsourcing remain the high variance in the annotation quality as well as the lack of domain specific knowledge of the individual workers. Current state-of-the-art methods for quality control usually induce further costs, as they rely on a redundant distribution of tasks or perform additional annotations on tasks with already known reference outcome. Aim of this thesis is to apply common crowdsourcing techniques for large-scale medical image annotation and create a cost effective quality control method for crowd-sourced image annotation. The problem of large-scale medical image annotation is addressed by introducing a hybrid crowd-algorithm approach that allowed expert-level organ segmentation in CT scans. A pilot study performed on the case of liver segmentation in abdominal CT scans showed that the proposed approach is able to create organ segmentations matching the quality of those create by medical experts. Recording the behavior of individual non-expert online workers during the annotation process in clickstreams enabled the derivation of an annotation quality measure that could successfully be used to merge crowd-sourced segmentations. A comprehensive validation study performed with various object classes from publicly available data sets demonstrated that the presented quality control measure generalizes well over different object classes and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of costs and segmentation quality. In conclusion, the methods introduced in this thesis are an essential contribution to reduce the annotation costs and further improve the quality of crowd-sourced image segmentation

Proceedings der 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) - Band 1

The two volumes represent the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik WI2013 (Business Information Systems). They include 118 papers from ten research tracks, a general track and the Student Consortium. The selection of all submissions was subject to a double blind procedure with three reviews for each paper and an overall acceptance rate of 25 percent. The WI2013 was organized at the University of Leipzig between February 27th and March 1st, 2013 and followed the main themes Innovation, Integration and Individualization.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge ManagementDie zweibändigen Tagungsbände zur 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) enthalten 118 Forschungsbeiträge aus zehn thematischen Tracks der Wirtschaftsinformatik, einem General Track sowie einem Student Consortium. Die Selektion der Artikel erfolgte nach einem Double-Blind-Verfahren mit jeweils drei Gutachten und führte zu einer Annahmequote von 25%. Die WI2013 hat vom 27.02. - 01.03.2013 unter den Leitthemen Innovation, Integration und Individualisierung an der Universität Leipzig stattgefunden.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge Managemen