Keynote by Cecilia Mascolo at Percom2016: Technology and Experiecne in the Physcial World

Cecilia Mascolo presents the keynote at Percom2016. Her opening statement is: “Technology must enhance and not substitute the physical experience”.

Cecilia makes the point that continuous sensing with mobile devices can overcome many issue that are well known with traditional studies (especially the classical problem of psychologist studying psychology students in a dark lab). One of here early papers (EmotionSense, see [1]) shows how we can move studies into the real world. This is not without difficulties, especially when you try to understand emotions.

Putting research apps into android market changes the game, large numbers of users become within reach. Higher numbers of participants require a clear purpose of the applications (Nielse Henze provide in [2] a nice recipe of how to do this). Her experience is that user engagement through gamification really worked. Even if the duration of participation of individuals is limited to weeks or months this generates very useful information. A short introduction to social sensing by Cecilia can be found in [3].

Different sensors have different energy and privacy cost and also different types of contributions. Correlating the accelerometer and happiness is really interesting. Users who are more active (not just movement, “being out and about”) are happier. Clustering accelerometer data and correlating it with other high level data opens exciting questions, e.g. health. Similarly correlating happiness and location leads to more surprising results: less happy at home and work, more when out and active. Looking at people’s personally and demographics shows that gender, age, employment, etc. has a clear correlation with activity and usage of communication.

Physical space matters! Using active badges they looked at how the change of physical space can impact peoples interactions [4]. The sensing approach allowed to understand how changes in physical space changes the behavior on a really fine grained level.

References:
[1] Rachuri, K. K., Musolesi, M., Mascolo, C., Rentfrow, P. J., Longworth, C., & Aucinas, A. (2010, September). EmotionSense: a mobile phones based adaptive platform for experimental social psychology research. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing (pp. 281-290). ACM. http://csce.uark.edu/~tingxiny/courses/5013sp14/reading/Rachuri2010EMP.pdf
[2] Henze, N., Shirazi, A. S., Schmidt, A., Pielot, M., & Michahelles, F. (2013). Empirical research through ubiquitous data collection. Computer, 46(6), 0074-76. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2013.202
[3] Mascolo, C. (2010). The power of mobile computing in a social era. IEEE Internet Computing, 14(6), 76. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.2037&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[4] Brown, C., Efstratiou, C., Leontiadis, I., Quercia, D., Mascolo, C., Scott, J., & Key, P. (2014, September). The architecture of innovation: Tracking face-to-face interactions with ubicomp technologies. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 811-822). ACM. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6829.pdf