SociableSense: exploring the trade-offs of adaptive sampling and computation offloading for social sensing

The interactions and social relations among users in workplaces have been studied by many generations of social psychologists. There is evidence that groups of users that interact more in workplaces are more productive. However, it is still hard for social scientists to capture fine-grained data about phenomena of this kind and to find the right means to facilitate interaction. It is also difficult for users to keep track of their level of sociability with colleagues. While mobile phones offer a fantastic platform for harvesting long term and fine grained data, they also pose challenges: battery power is limited and needs to be traded-off for sensor reading accuracy and data transmission, while energy costs in processing computationally intensive tasks are high.

In this paper, we propose SociableSense, a smart phones based platform that captures user behavior in office environments, while providing the users with a quantitative measure of their sociability and that of colleagues. We tackle the technical challenges of building such a tool: the system provides an adaptive sampling mechanism as well as models to decide whether to perform computation of tasks, such as the execution of classification and inference algorithms, locally or remotely. We perform several micro-benchmark tests to fine-tune and evaluate the performance of these mechanisms and we show that the adaptive sampling and computation distribution schemes balance trade-offs among accuracy, energy, latency, and data traffic. Finally, by means of a social psychological study with ten participants for two working weeks, we demonstrate that SociableSense fosters interactions among the participants and helps in enhancing their sociability.