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SocialCircuits : The Art of Using Mobile Phones for Modeling Personal Interactions. Wayne Stilwell CS 595 September 29, 2011. What is it?. Platform that uses mobile phones and surveys to capture relationships and influences in a dense community Mobile phones track interaction with others
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SocialCircuits:The Art of Using Mobile Phones for Modeling Personal Interactions Wayne Stilwell CS 595 September 29, 2011
What is it? • Platform that uses mobile phones and surveys to capture relationships and influences in a dense community • Mobile phones track interaction with others • Surveys track changes in habits, opinions, and health
Experiment at a glance • Deployed on a “physically and socially distant” college dorm in the 2009-2010 school year • Over 65 of 90 students participated • Some declined due to privacy concerns • 65% of residents said most of their friends/contacts lived in the dorm • Data captured: • 3 million co-location samples • 60,000 phone calls • 20,000 text messages
Devices used • Based on Windows Mobile 6 • Students transferred existing voice plans • Tested on Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile • Works on 6 different smart-phones • Source code available at: http://mob.media.mit.edu
System capabilities • Detect nearby Bluetooth devices • Detect WiFi access points • Log phone calls and text messages • Background scan manager • Ensures Bluetooth and WiFi are activated • On-device survey launcher • Launches daily surveys when phone is turned on
System capabilities • On-device user feedback engine • Students could respond to other’s responses • Over-the-air application updater • Custom Music Player • Students could play, share, rate, and search through a library of 1500 tracks • Flexible integration with web-based survey • MySQL tables generated for each user for data analysis
Study: Political opinions • Goal is to see how our opinions diffuse across our social networks • Surveyed students 3 times (each month before the election) • Asked their interest in politics & party preference • Based on these results, and who a student interacted with, they could predict if that person is likely to accept or reject new opinions
Tips for future attempts • Mobile phone sensors • Using GPS and Bluetooth to track location and proximity are useful, but both must be enabled • Accelerometers are less accurate if the phone does not remain at a fixed spot on the body
Tips for future attempts • Platform Openness, Cross-Carrier Support • Only a jail-broken iPhone could run this platform at the time • For a large-scale experiment, just use a single app (instead of manually installing software on hundreds of phones)
Tips for future attempts • Community Selection • Density is more important than volume • Want to track as many reasons as you can why someone’s behaviors changed
Tips for future attempts • Community Preparation • Some were concerned about privacy • Ironically their concerns “diffused” to others • Personal identifiers in data were hashed, disguised, and removed • Some were uncomfortable doing the surveys. So they were not mandatory. • Students were also paid $1/day each time they filled out a survey.
Tips for future attempts • Long-Term Reliability • Get help on the ground • Encourage participants to report problems • Students offered $10 to be first to report a bug • Use minimal amount of handsets • More handsets = more costly bugs • Avoid on-device flash memory • They wrote every 5 minutes for 3 months, then the disk failed • Pay subjects incrementally