Smartphones incorporate many diverse and powerful sensors, which creates exciting new opportunities for data mining and human-computer interaction. In this paper we show how standard classification algorithms can use labeled smartphone-based accelerometer data to identify the physical activity a user is performing. Our main focus is on evaluating the relative performance of impersonal and personal activity recognition models. Our impersonal (i.e., universal) models are built using training data from a panel of users and are then applied to new users, while our personal models are built with data from each user and then applied only to new data from that user. Our results indicate that the personal models perform dramatically better than the impersonal models—even when trained from only a few minutes worth of data. These personal models typically even outperform hybrid models that utilize both personal and impersonal data. These results strongly argue for the construction of personal models whenever possible. Our research means that we can unobtrusively gain useful knowledge about the habits of potentially millions of users. It also means that we can facilitate human computer interaction by enabling the smartphone to consider context and this can lead to new and more effective applications.

Public sensing is a new research area in the fields of wireless sensor networks and mobile computing. It leverages the mobile sensors and system resources readily available in mobile phones to execute sensing tasks. In order to plan, execute and adapt large-scale sensing tasks, applications need to query for the available resources, e.g. the density of certain sensors. We investigate how such information can be provided, and we propose a resource manager for public sensing. Our primary goal is to minimize the energy consumed by the mobile devices to make public sensing feasible without disturbing users. We propose a cluster-based protocol for collecting local views of the resource state using local ad-hoc communication since this is much more energy-efficient than long-range (e.g. cellular) communication. We compare our solution to a standard approach where mobile devices communicate their resource states using the cellular phone network. We show that 65% of the energy is saved and the communication load on the infrastructure is reduced by 90% while an average delivery ratio of 93% is retained.

With the increasing popularity of smartphones, the wide availability of mobile Internet and the higher computational power of mobile devices, new types of applications are now possible. It is important to provide a smooth user experience by facilitating the interaction with the device. To do so, the goal of the work is support proactive recommendations on the mobile device. In order to determine the best point in time for a recommendation, various context information needs to be taken into account. One interesting aspect is determining the current user activity, e.g. whether the user is walking or not. In this paper, we present an algorithm that runs online on a smartphone and analyzes the user activity based on GPS data.

Understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of people within a city is crucial to many planning applications. Obtaining data to create required knowledge, currently involves costly survey methods. At the same time ubiquitous mobile sensors from personal GPS devices to mobile phones are collecting massive amounts of data on urban systems. The locations, communications, and activities of millions of people are recorded and stored by new information technologies. This work utilizes novel dynamic data, generated by mobile phone users, to measure spatiotemporal changes in population. In the process, we identify the relationship between land use and dynamic population over the course of a typical week. A machine learning classification algorithm is used to identify clusters of locations with similar zoned uses and mobile phone activity patterns. It is shown that the mobile phone data is capable of delivering useful information on actual land use that supplements zoning regulations.

This paper proposes a novel telemedicine system for type 2 diabetes patients. The proposed system supports the patient self-management via a set of telemedicine devices, consisting of health sensors and a smart phone. The proposed system covers not only the sensor data but also the diet (food) and exercise data. To capture the food information, we also developed the voice recognition module focusing on the food names. The basic feasibility of the system is practically demonstrated in the preliminary experiment.

We describe a framework for rapidly prototyping applications which require intelligent visual processing, but for which reliable algorithms do not yet exist, or for which engineering those algorithms is too costly. The framework, CrowdSight, leverages the power of crowdsourcing to offload intelligent processing to humans, and enables new applications to be built quickly and cheaply, affording system builders the opportunity to validate a concept before committing significant time or capital. Our service accepts requests from users either via email or simple mobile applications, and handles all the communication with a backend human computation platform. We build redundant requests and data aggregation into the system freeing the user from managing these requirements. We validate our framework by building several test applications and verifying that prototypes can be built more easily and quickly than would be the case without the framework.

We describe work on representing and using a rich notion ofcontext that goes beyond current networking applications focusingmostly on location. Our context model includes locationand surroundings, the presence of people and devices,inferred activities and the roles people fill in them. A keyelement of our work is the use of collaborative informationsharing where devices share and integrate knowledge abouttheir context. This introduces a requirement that users canset appropriate levels of privacy to protect the personal informationbeing collected and the inferences that can be drawnfrom it. We use Semantic Web technologies to model contextand to specify high-level, declarative policies specifying informationsharing constraints. The policies involve attributesof the subject (i.e., information recipient), target (i.e., the information)and their dynamic context (e.g., are the parties copresent).We discuss our ongoing work on context representationand inference and present a model for protecting andcontrolling the sharing of private data in context-aware mobileapplications.

In this paper, we study a time-critical facet of context-awareness: context transitions, which we model as changes in specific context types over time, e.g., activity or location. We present results from a user-centred field study involving participant interviews and motion data capture from two mobile device sensors: the accelerometer and magnetic field sensor. The results show how the participants subjectively interpret their daily context transitions with variable granularity, and a comparison of these context transitions with mobile device motion data shows how the motion data poorly reflect the identified transitions. The results imply that care should be taken when representing and modelling users’ subjective interpretations of context, as well as the objective nature of context sensors. Furthermore, processing and usability trade-offs should be made if real-time on-device transition detection is to be implemented.

Effective visualization resizing is important for many visualization tasks, where users may have display devices with different sizes and aspect ratios. Our recently designed framework can adapt a visualization to different displays by transforming the resizing problem into a non-linear optimization problem. However, it is not scalable to a large amount of dense information. Undesired cluttered results would be produced if dense information is presented in the target display. We present an extension to our resizing framework with a seamless integration of a sampling-based data abstraction mechanism, such that it is scalable with not only different display sizes, but also different amounts of information.

We have carefully instrumented a large portion of the population living in a university graduate dormitory by giving participants Android smart phones running our sensing software. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of predicting mobile application (known as “apps”) installation using social networks and explain its challenge. Modern smart phones, like the ones used in our study, are able to collect different social networks using built-in sensors. (e.g. Bluetooth proximity network, call log network, etc) While this information is accessible to app market makers such as the iPhone AppStore, it has not yet been studied how app market makers can use these information for marketing research and strategy development. We develop a simple computational model to better predict app installation by using a composite network computed from the different networks sensed by phones. Our model also captures individual variance and exogenous factors in app adoption. We show the importance of considering all these factors in predicting app installations, and we observe the surprising result that app installation is indeed predictable. We also show that our model achieves the best results compared with generic approaches.