MCSS 2012

1st ACM Workshop on Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science


9:00 AM Keynote 1

  • Hamet Watt, Co-founder of bLife and MoviePass
    Changing the World One Mobile Device at a Time
    We are at a pivotal time in the history of social sciences. The emergence of new fields like positive psychology, the maturity of therapy approaches like CBT and Behavioral Activation, and our deepened understanding of behavior change, coincide with a technology revolution that is focused on always-on, connected mobile devices, that also connect to our various social networks. This exciting environment creates fertile grounds for new disciplines of research, new technologies, and new business opportunities. New types of teams are now forming where social scientists, computer scientists, and game designers work together to create engines that drive behavior change that propagates up through social networks to form a change throughout society. This talk describes bLife's experience in designing, building, and selling mobile applications together with social scientists, the lessons learned, and the future outlook.

10:00 - 11:00 AM Session 1: Social Sciences and Mobile Systems

  • What does Psychology and Psychiatry Need from Mobile Systems? An End-user Perspective
    Philip Santangelo, Susanne Koudela and Ulrich Ebner-Priemer
  • Building a Dynamic and Computational Understanding of Personal Social Networks
    Jason Wiese, Jason Hong and John Zimmerman

11:00 - 11:30 AM (Coffee Break)

11:30 - 12:30 PM Session 2: Algorithms and Techniques for Computational Social Science

  • Capturing Transitions Between Users' Semantically Meaningful Places Using Mobile Devices
    Tom Lovett and Eamonn O'Neill
  • Challenges for Social Sensing using WiFi Signals
    Mikkel Baun Kjaergaard and Petteri Nurmi

12:30 - 1:30 PM (Lunch)

1:30 - 2:30 PM Keynote 2

  • Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap/EPFL, Switzerland
    Can We Tame Mobile Research in the Wild?
    In this talk, I will present an overview of two large-scale research initiatives (jointly with Nokia Research Center Lausanne) aimed at advancing methods for smartphone sensing and data analysis in everyday life: the Lausanne Data Collection Campaign and the Mobile Data Challenge. These initiatives resulted, on one hand, in real-life, longitudinal data sets representing a sizeable population of smartphone users, and on the other hand, in hundreds of researchers interested in studying the data from many different perspectives. Specifically in the context of Computational Social Science, I will share a few lessons we have learned from these experiences, and discuss what the near future could bring regarding the study of mobile systems in the wild.

2:30 - 3:30 PM (Coffee Break) Posters and Demos

  • EmotionSense: Emotion Recognition and Social Sensing based on Smart Phones
    Kiran Rachuri
  • myPersonality Project: Example of Successful Utilization of Online Social Networks for Large-Scale Social Research
    David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski
  • A Demonstration of the Next Generation Research Tool for Ambulatory Assessment
    Jurgen Stumpp, Jorg Ottenbacher and Ulrich Grobmann

3:30 - 4:30 PM Session 3: Applications and Deployments

  • Using Idle Moments to Record Your Health via Mobile Applications
    Neal Lathia
  • Social Sensing in the Field: Challenges in Detecting Social Interactions in Construction Site
    Sarfraz Nawaz, Christos Efstratiou, Cecilia Mascolo and Kenichi Soga
  • Descrambling the Social TV Echo Chamber
    Nitya Narasimhan and Venugopal Vasudevan

4:30 - 5:00 PM Closing discussion

MCSS: Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science
The 10th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2012)
Low Wood Bay, Lake District, United Kingdom. June 26-29, 2012