Skip to main content

SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building

  • Conference paper
Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4718))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 918 Accesses

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach to analyzing the social behaviors that occur in a typical office space. We describe a system consisting of over 200 motion sensors connected in a wireless network observing a medium-sized office space populated with almost 100 people for a period of almost a year. We use a tracklet graph representation of the data in the sensor network, which allows us to efficiently evaluate gross patterns of office-wide social behavior of its occupants during expected seasonal changes in the workforce as well as unexpected social events that affect the entire population of the space. We present our experiments with a method based on Kullback-Leibler metric applied to the office activity modelled as a Markov process. Using this approach we detect gross deviations of short term office-wide behavior patterns from previous long-term patterns spanning various time intervals. We compare detected deviations to the company calendar and find and provide some quantitative analysis of the relative impact of those disruptions across a range of temporal scales. We also present a favorable comparison to results achieved by applying the same analysis to email logs.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Allen, T.: Architecture and communication among product development engineers. In: Proceedings of the Engineering Management Society, pp. 153–158. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Reynolds, C., Picard, R.: Evaluation of affective computing systems from a dimensional metaethical position. In: First Augmented Cognition International Conference, Las Vegas, NV (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ivanov, Y., Sorokin, A., Wren, C., Kaur, I.: Tracking people in mixed modality systems. Visual Communications and Image Processing, EI123., IS&T/SPIE (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Scott, J.P.: Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Tichy, N.M., Tushman, M.L., Fombrun, C.: Social network analysis for organizations. The Academy of Management Review 27 (1979)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Tyler, J., Wilkinson, D., Huberman, B.A: Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations. In: Communities and Technologies, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  7. van Alstyne, M., Zhang, J.: Emailnet: A system for automatically mining social networks from organizational email communication. In: Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  8. McCallum, A., Corrada-Emmanuel, A., Wang, X.: Topic and role discovery in social networks. In: 19th Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Culotta, A., Bekkerman, R., McCallum, A.: Extracting social networks and contact information from email and the web. In: Conference on Email and Spam (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Aipperspach, R., Cohen, E., Canny, J.: Modeling human behavior from simple sensors in the home. In: Proceedings Of The IEEE Conference On Pervasive Computing (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Wilson, D.H., Atkeson, C.: Simultaneous tracking & activity recognition (star) using many anonymous, binary sensors. In: The Third International Conference on Pervasive Computing, pp. 62–79 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Munguia Tapia, E., Intille, S.S., Lopez, L., Larson, K.: The design of a portable kit of wireless sensors for naturalistic data collection. In: Fishkin, K.P., Schiele, B., Nixon, P., Quigley, A. (eds.) PERVASIVE 2006. LNCS, vol. 3968, Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Abowd, G., Bobick, A., Essa, I., Mynatt, E., Rogers, W.: The aware home: Developing technologies for successful aging. In: Proceedings of AAAI Workshop on Automation as a Care Giver (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Eagle, N., Pentland, A.: Reality mining: Sensing complex social systems. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10(4), 255–268 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Choudhury, T., Pentland, A.: Characterizing social networks using the sociometer. In: Proceedings of the North American Association of Computational Social and Organizational Science (NAACSOS) (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Reynolds, C.J., Wren, C.R.: Worse is better for ambient sensing. In: Pervasive: Workshop on Privacy, Trust and Identity Issues for Ambient Intelligence (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Athans, M., Chang, C.B.: Adaptive estimation and parameter identification using multiple model estimation algorithm. Technical Report, 1976-28, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA, Group 32 (1976)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Moeslund, T.B., Granum, E.: A survey of computer vision-based human motion capture. Computer Vision and Image Understanding 81, 231–268 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Stark, H., Woods, J.W: Probability, Random Processes, and Estimation Theory for Engineers, 2nd edn. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Rached, Z., Alajaji, F., Campbell, L.L.: The kullback-leibler divergence rate between markov sources. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 50(5) (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kuhl, M.E., Wilson, J.R.: Modeling and simulating poisson processes having trends or nontrigonometric cyclic effects. European Journal of Operational research 133, 566–582 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Consolvo, S., Walker, M.: Using the experience sampling method to evaluate ubicomp applications. In: Pervasive Computing, pp. 24–31. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Bernard, H.R., Killworth, P.D: Informant accuracy in social network data ii. Human Communications Research 4(1), 3–18 (1977)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Jeffrey Hightower Bernt Schiele Thomas Strang

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Wren, C.R., Ivanov, Y.A., Kaur, I., Leigh, D., Westhues, J. (2007). SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building. In: Hightower, J., Schiele, B., Strang, T. (eds) Location- and Context-Awareness. LoCA 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4718. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75160-1_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75160-1_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75159-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75160-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics