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Studying user behavior through a participatory sensing framework in an urban context
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Resumo(s)
The widespread use of mobile devices has given birth to participatory sensing,
a data collection approach leveraging the sheer number of device users, their
mobility, intelligence and device’s increasingly powerful computing and sensing
capabilities. As a result, participatory sensing is able to collect various types of
information at a high spatial and temporal resolution and it has many applications
ranging from measuring cellular signal strength or road condition monitoring to
observing the distribution of birds. However, in order to achieve better results from
participatory sensing, some issues needed to be dealt with. On a high level, this
thesis addressed two issues: (1) the design and development of a participatory
sensing framework that allows users to flexibly create campaigns and at the same
time collect different types of data and (2) the study of different aspects of the user
behaviors in the context of participatory sensing.
In particular, the first contribution of the thesis is the design and development of
Citizense, a participatory sensing framework that facilitates flexible deployments
of participatory sensing campaigns while at the same time providing intuitive
interfaces for users to create sensing campaigns and collect a variety of data
types. During the real-world deployments of Citizense, it has shown its effectiveness
in collecting different types of urban information and subsequently received
appreciation from different stakeholders. The second contribution of the thesis
is the in-depth study of user behavior under the presence of different monetary
incentive mechanisms and the analysis of the spatial and temporal user behavior
when participants are simultaneously exposed to a large number of participatory
sensing campaigns. Concerning the monetary incentive, it is observed that participants
prefer fixed micro-payment to other mechanisms (i.e., lottery, variable
micro-payment); their participation was increased significantly when they were
given this incentive. When taking part in the participatory sensing process, participants exhibit certain spatial and temporal behaviors. They tend to primarily
contribute in their free time during the working week, although the decision to
respond and complete a particular participatory sensing campaign seems to be
correlated to the campaign’s geographical context and/or the recency of the participants’
activities. Participants can be divided into two groups according to their
behaviors: a smaller group of active participants who frequently perform participatory
sensing activities and a larger group of regular participants who exhibit more
intermittent behaviors.
Descrição
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Geographic Information Systems
Palavras-chave
Participatory sensing User behavior Framework Monetary incentive Data collection