Representing and Evaluating Social Context on Mobile Devices

Divert: Mother-in-law
Representing and Evaluating
Social Context on Mobile Devices

Kris Mihalic
ICT&S Center, University of Salzburg, Austria
Manfred Tscheligi
ICT&S Center, University of Salzburg, Austria

Research on Context

•  Context is a hot topic in HCI
–  Context-aware systems, location-based services,
etc.
•  Also an issue in other sciences
–  E.g. social sciences: context in human
communication
•  Lack of empirically based research

MobileHCI 2007 Singapore Kris Mihalic, Manfred Tscheligi

Related research

•  ContextContacts
–  Contextual cues about callees current situation
–  Privacy management: what data can safely be
communicated; service control
–  Oulasvirta / Raento / Tiitta (2005)


Related research

•  Reality Mining
–  Sampled context information over a longer period
of time on the users device
–  Measurements of strength, dynamics and evolution
of social networks
–  Eagle / Pentland, 2006


Related research

•  Defined Delivery (DeDe)
–  Allows sender of a message to define the context
or situation in which the message should be
delivered to recipient
–  Field trial with socially tight group of seven
individuals for one month
–  Sender must have good knowledge of recipient’s
activities and habits
–  Jung / Persson / Blom (2005)


Related research

•  Ethno-methodologically inspired study
observing people in their daily activities
•  Results describe phenomena in mobility
–  How situational and planned acts intermesh in
navigation
–  How people construct personal and group spaces
–  How temporal tensions develop and dissolve
•  Tamminen et al. (2003)


Related research

•  Focus group on usage of mobiles
–  Students and field workers
–  Phone as personal artifact
–  Social constraints: importance of socially higher
persons
–  Side-stepping: using phone during "free" times
–  Mihalic / Tscheligi (2006)


Interactional Context

•  Emerges through the interaction between users
by means of the device
•  Associated with actions and events
•  Comprises a variety of social factors
–  Formality
–  Mood
–  Situation constraints
–  etc.
•  Research on interactional context still
underrepresented, but highly important with
mobiles

Objectives

1.  Examine how social relationships can be
utilized in a mobile system in order to provide
a more appropriate service to the user
2.  Represent a dynamic model of social context
in the system
3.  Research on suitable methods for evaluating
social context in-situ


Approach

•  Focus group on how people perceive social
relationships when using mobile phones
(Mihalic / Tscheligi 2006)
•  Requirements
•  Context-of-use model as ontology
•  Prototypical implementation
•  Evaluation in the field


Model

•  Comprises
–  Relationship type
–  Mood
–  Communication channel and content
–  Settings
•  Modeled as ontologies


Relationship type


Mood

•  PANAS scheme
(Watson / Clark /
Tellegen 1988)
•  Single list of choices
rather than semantic
differential scale
•  Added 'neutral' item


Communication channel and content


Settings


Study design

•  Eight participants for one week (including
weekend)
•  Field workers: insurance agents, technicians and
installers, IT coordinators
•  Aged between 26 and 51 (37 on average)
•  All male
•  Experienced mobile phone users
•  User-initiated and system triggered sampling
–  8 notifications between 8:30am and 10:30pm
–  Participants instructed to report on their own


ESM

•  Experience Sampling Method (ESM)
–  AKA beeper studies, time sampling
•  Field study technique from psychology
•  Used to understand
–  Mood
–  Social interactions
•  Primary choice for understanding user in
context as well as context factors


ESM Overview

•  Participants fill out questionnaire when alerted
–  Researcher is not present
–  Alerted several times per day
–  Business as usual until alerted
–  Triggered within users’ current context
•  Duration usually 1-2 weeks


Prototype

•  Conduct evaluation based on scenarios
•  Supports ESM methodology
•  Client part runs on a mobile phone
•  Server part needed for “heavy-duty” work
–  No Semantic Web technologies available for mobile
phones
–  Porting of Semantic Web technologies to mobile
OS out of scope


System model (high-level)


Mobile client

•  Implemented in Python
•  Runs on Symbian Series 60 2nd Ed.
•  Two modes
–  User can answer questionnaire by herself
–  Questionnaire is automatically initiated by the
Service (via SMS)


Mobile client


Backend service

•  Implemented as Java Web-Application
•  Runs on a J2EE compliant server (Tomcat)
•  Uses Semantic Web framework (Jena)
•  Uses OWL as ontology repository
•  Provides (simple) web-based UI for
management and administration
•  Communication to Mobile client via SMS
(gateway) and HTTP


Background service


Ontologies

•  ESM ontology
–  Describes the study, participants, questionnaires,
alerts and triggers, questions and answers
–  Can be used for any study (with or without an user
ontology)
•  User ontology
–  Describes relations between the user and her
communication partners (e.g. phone book records)
–  Is particular to this study


Results

•  Mood
•  Communication channels and content
•  Recommended and overridden settings
•  Methodology


Results: Channels & content


Results: Mood

60% PA
16% NA
24% neutral

Results: Mood and relationships

Tighter social relationships and social activities
associated with higher PA? (Vittengl / Holt 1998; Clark /
Watson 1988)

Results: Recommended & overridden settings


Results: Methodology

P#6: "If the questionnaire comes immediately after the
call or SMS, and I get the call at midnight, then I would
respond!"

Results: User feedback

•  Positive
–  Use of prototype straightforward, would use for
longer period
–  Users didn’t experience the system as obtrusive or
interrupting their tasks
•  Negative
–  Technical issues (data settings…)
–  Skeptical about fully automated solution


In a nutshell

1.  Communicated content and relationship types have an
impact on choosing the communication channels -
messaging for private, and voice for business; mood is
dependant on the kind of the relationship - positive mood
is associated with distant relationships
2.  Semantic Web ontologies are suitable for representing
complex and dynamic information in a system, with a
lack of systems available on mobile platforms
3.  ESM is appropriate for studying social context in-situ;
using a combination of event-based and time-based
sampling can provide higher user acceptance and better
results


Acknowledgment

Parts of this work have been carried out under the FIT-IT
grant of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport,
Innovation and Technology, contract number 809272/9295.


Representing and Evaluating Social Context on Mobile Devices

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