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XRec: Behavior-Based User Recognition Across Mobile Devices

Published: 11 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

As smartphones and tablets become increasingly prevalent, more customers have multiple devices. The multi-user, multi-device interactions inspire many problems worthy of investigation, among which recognizing users across devices has significant implications on recommendation, advertising and user experience. Unlike the binary classification problem in user identification on a single device, cross-device user recognition is essentially a set partition problem. The app back-end aims to divide user activities on devices hosting the app into groups each associated with one user. In this paper, we present XRec which leverages user behavioral patterns, namely when, where and how a user uses the app, to achieve the recognition. To address the user-device partition problem, we propose a classification-plus-refinement algorithm. To validate our approach, we conduct a field study with an Android app. We instrument the app to collect usage data from real users. We provide proof-of-concept experimental results to demonstrate how XRec can provide added value to mobile apps, with the ability to correctly match a user across multiple devices with 70% recall and 90% precision.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 3
September 2017
2023 pages
EISSN:2474-9567
DOI:10.1145/3139486
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 September 2017
Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 3

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  • (2023)FedAPI: Privacy-preserving Multi-end Adaptive Personal Identification via Federated Learning2023 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence of Things and Systems (AIoTSys)10.1109/AIoTSys58602.2023.00051(198-205)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
  • (2022)RLTIR: Activity-Based Interactive Person Identification via Reinforcement Learning TreeIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2021.31040249:6(4464-4475)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2022
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  • (2020)Behavioral Biometrics for Continuous Authentication in the Internet-of-Things Era: An Artificial Intelligence PerspectiveIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2020.30040777:9(9128-9143)Online publication date: Sep-2020
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