Algorithms for Quantifying Human Behavioral Dynamics from Smartphone Sensor Data

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Computers and computer systems are not independent of human behaviour. Where we are and what we do drives placement and algorithms in both physical and virtual infrastructure. The impact of these behaviours extend beyond computer science to civil engineering and architecture (where we are and how we move through space?), public health fields (for how long and with whom have we been in contact?), and even the social sciences (how is mobility mediated by space?). Many of these behaviours are anchored in where we are, who we are with, and what we are doing. Understanding where people are and who they are with helps modelers who seek to better understand the use of space or the spread of disease, wireless network designers looking to provide better more responsive service, and even social robots understand where and when they might meet specific individuals. ***Until recently, gathering this data has been hampered by technology. The traditional tools of the social scientist are either too blunt (e.g. surveys or census data) or too expensive to deploy widely (e.g. direct observation or ethnographies). Recent advances in the miniaturization of sensors, and their incorporation into smartphones, has made collecting high fidelity data on the where, when, how and with whom of human behaviour automatable. Our lab has had considerable success over the last four years designing and deploying these kinds of systems.***However, collecting data is just the tip of the iceberg. Gigabytes of behavioural data need to be processed in such a way as to allow researchers to manipulate the data in ways that lead to insight. This grant proposes to investigate how we might encode the behaviour of humans in reasonable ways. Just as the general behaviour of a turbulent water flow can be encapsulated in one or two simple ratios, we hope to derive metrics of human behaviour, and efficient computational algorithms for computing them.***This research will have profound and far-reaching impacts, changing the way that decisions about public health and infrastructure are made, and providing a new way of understanding what it looks like to be human.**