Thursday, May 3, 2018

Sensors & Behaviour

Our world is increasingly interconnected via a wide variety of computers, IoT, wearable and mobile devices. The information provided collectively through these devices offers insightful information on our everyday lives, daily patterns, and behaviour on both an individual and group level. The SaB’18 (Sensors & Behaviour) workshop brings together researchers interested in collecting and augmenting context to understand device specific behaviour and routines. The outcomes of this workshop are new tools, methodologies, and potential collaborations at the boundary of behavioural studies and sensing technologies.

The rapidly increasing use of computers, IoT-devices, and interconnected wearables and mobile devices have given individuals, researchers, (commercial) organisations, and governments access to nearly unlimited information in the form of digital data. This personal information offers unique insights on different tiers of behaviour – individual behaviour traits, combined traits, and group behaviours as observed through a combination of data from multiple individuals.

In the context of mobile computing, mobile and wearable devices can collect an uninterrupted stream of information about the user’s activity, location, and e.g., device usage related information. Mobile devices have several built-in sensors (e.g., accelerometer, proximity sensor, gyroscope). These mobile sensors are primarily used by the mobile operating system to enhance the user experience, such as app functionality or mobile device user interaction (e.g., vibration feedback, screen orientation detection). Other sensed measurements (e.g., overall device use, application choices, battery-related characteristics) can reveal information on a user’s device usage behaviour. Information retrieved via these sensors and further processed can further reveal associations with the users behaviour in vivo, or daily affect, such as boredom or stress.

In this workshop, we bring together researchers who take advantage of the proliferation of mobile devices, use these devices as instruments for research on human activities and device usage behaviour. We investigate new and existing methods and tools for collecting instrumented data. We are especially interested in mobile devices, systems, applications, methods and tools that were built to collect, augment, and explore such rich datasets. More so, we want researchers to share their experiences, successes, and frustrations on conducting research and analysing information from such power and processing constrained devices to capture the state-of-the-art.