Ring, M.; Otto, F.; Becker, M.; Niebler, T.; Landes, D. & Hotho, A. (2015), ConDist: A Context-Driven Categorical Distance Measure, in ECMLPKDD2015, ed., .
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Sîrbu, A.; Becker, M.; Caminiti, S.; De Baets, B.; Elen, B.; Francis, L.; Gravino, P.; Hotho, A.; Ingarra, S.; Loreto, V.; Molino, A.; Mueller, J.; Peters, J.; Ricchiuti, F.; Saracino, F.; Servedio, V. D. P.; Stumme, G.; Theunis, J.; Tria, F. & Van den Bossche, J. (2015), 'Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative', PLoS ONE 10 (8) , e0136763 .
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<p>The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.</p>

Atzmueller, M.; Becker, M.; Kibanov, M.; Scholz, C.; Doerfel, S.; Hotho, A.; Macek, B.-E.; Mitzlaff, F.; Mueller, J. & Stumme, G. (2014), 'Ubicon and its Applications for Ubiquitous Social Computing', New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 20 (1) , 53--77 .
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Atzmueller, M.; Becker, M.; Kibanov, M.; Scholz, C.; Doerfel, S.; Hotho, A.; Macek, B.-E.; Mitzlaff, F.; Mueller, J. & Stumme, G. (2014), 'Ubicon and its applications for ubiquitous social computing', New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 20 (1) , 53-77 .
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The combination of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which integrates different but complementary methods, techniques and tools. In this paper, we focus on the Ubicon platform, its applications, and a large spectrum of analysis results. Ubicon provides an extensible framework for building and hosting applications targeting both ubiquitous and social environments. We summarize the architecture and exemplify its implementation using four real-world applications built on top of Ubicon. In addition, we discuss several scientific experiments in the context of these applications in order to give a better picture of the potential of the framework, and discuss analysis results using several real-world data sets collected utilizing Ubicon.

Atzmueller, M.; Becker, M.; Kibanov, M.; Scholz, C.; Doerfel, S.; Hotho, A.; Macek, B.-E.; Mitzlaff, F.; Mueller, J. & Stumme, G. (2014), 'Ubicon and its Applications for Ubiquitous Social Computing', New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 1 (20) , 53--77 .
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Becker, M.; Hotho, A.; Mueller, J.; Kibanov, M.; Atzmueller, M. & Stumme, G. (2014), 'Subjective vs. Objective Data: Bridging the Gap' , CSSWS 2014, Poster .
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Sensor data is objective. But when measuring our environment, measured values are contrasted with our perception, which is always subjective. This makes interpreting sensor measurements difficult for a single person in her personal environment. In this context, the EveryAware projects directly connects the concepts of objective sensor data with subjective impressions and perceptions by providing a collective sensing platform with several client applications allowing to explicitly associate those two data types. The goal is to provide the user with personalized feedback, a characterization of the global as well as her personal environment, and enable her to position her perceptions in this global context. In this poster we summarize the collected data of two EveryAware applications, namely WideNoise for noise measurements and AirProbe for participatory air quality sensing. Basic insights are presented including user activity, learning processes and sensor data to perception correlations. These results provide an outlook on how this data can further be used to understand the connection between sensor data and perceptions.

2013

Becker, M.; Mueller, J.; Hotho, A. & Stumme, G. (2013), A Generic Platform for Ubiquitous and Subjective Data, in '1st International Workshop on Pervasive Urban Crowdsensing Architecture and Applications, PUCAA 2013, Zurich, Switzerland -- September 9, 2013. Proceedings' , ACM, New York, NY, USA , pp. 1175--1182 .
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An increasing number of platforms like Xively or ThingSpeak are available to manage ubiquitous sensor data enabling the Internet of Things. Strict data formats allow interoperability and informative visualizations, supporting the development of custom user applications. Yet, these strict data formats as well as the common feed-centric approach limit the flexibility of these platforms. We aim at providing a concept that supports data ranging from text-based formats like JSON to images and video footage. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of extensions, which allows to enrich existing data points with additional information, thus, taking a data point centric approach. This enables us to gain semantic and user specific context by attaching subjective data to objective values. This paper provides an overview of our architecture including concept, implementation details and present applications. We distinguish our approach from several other systems and describe two sensing applications namely AirProbe and WideNoise that were implemented for our platform.

Becker, M.; Mueller, J.; Hotho, A. & Stumme, G. (2013), A Generic Platform for Ubiquitous and Subjective Data, in '1st International Workshop on Pervasive Urban Crowdsensing Architecture and Applications, PUCAA 2013, Zurich, Switzerland -- September 9, 2013. Proceedings' , ACM, , pp. New York, NY, USA .
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Becker, M.; Caminiti, S.; Fiorella, D.; Francis, L.; Gravino, P.; Haklay, M. (M.; Hotho, A.; Loreto, V.; Mueller, J.; Ricchiuti, F.; Servedio, V. D. P.; Sîrbu, A. & Tria, F. (2013), 'Awareness and Learning in Participatory Noise Sensing', PLoS ONE 8 (12) , e81638 .
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<p>The development of ICT infrastructures has facilitated the emergence of new paradigms for looking at society and the environment over the last few years. Participatory environmental sensing, i.e. directly involving citizens in environmental monitoring, is one example, which is hoped to encourage learning and enhance awareness of environmental issues. In this paper, an analysis of the behaviour of individuals involved in noise sensing is presented. Citizens have been involved in noise measuring activities through the WideNoise smartphone application. This application has been designed to record both objective (noise samples) and subjective (opinions, feelings) data. The application has been open to be used freely by anyone and has been widely employed worldwide. In addition, several test cases have been organised in European countries. Based on the information submitted by users, an analysis of emerging awareness and learning is performed. The data show that changes in the way the environment is perceived after repeated usage of the application do appear. Specifically, users learn how to recognise different noise levels they are exposed to. Additionally, the subjective data collected indicate an increased user involvement in time and a categorisation effect between pleasant and less pleasant environments.</p>

Becker, M.; Caminiti, S.; Fiorella, D.; Francis, L.; Gravino, P.; Haklay, M. (M.; Hotho, A.; Loreto, V.; Mueller, J.; Ricchiuti, F.; Servedio, V. D. P.; Sîrbu, A. & Tria, F. (2013), 'Awareness and Learning in Participatory Noise Sensing', PLOS ONE 8 (12) , e81638 .
[Volltext] [Kurzfassung] [BibTeX] [Endnote]

The development of ICT infrastructures has facilitated the emergence of new paradigms for looking at society and the environment over the last few years. Participatory environmental sensing, i.e. directly involving citizens in environmental monitoring, is one example, which is hoped to encourage learning and enhance awareness of environmental issues. In this paper, an analysis of the behaviour of individuals involved in noise sensing is presented. Citizens have been involved in noise measuring activities through the WideNoise smartphone application. This application has been designed to record both objective (noise samples) and subjective (opinions, feelings) data. The application has been open to be used freely by anyone and has been widely employed worldwide. In addition, several test cases have been organised in European countries. Based on the information submitted by users, an analysis of emerging awareness and learning is performed. The data show that changes in the way the environment is perceived after repeated usage of the application do appear. Specifically, users learn how to recognise different noise levels they are exposed to. Additionally, the subjective data collected indicate an increased user involvement in time and a categorisation effect between pleasant and less pleasant environments.

Mueller, J.; Doerfel, S.; Becker, M.; Hotho, A. & Stumme, G. (2013), Tag Recommendations for SensorFolkSonomies, in 'Recommender Systems and the Social Web Workshop at 7th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys 2013, Hong Kong, China -- October 12-16, 2013. Proceedings' , CEUR-WS, Aachen, Germany .
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With the rising popularity of smart mobile devices, sensor data-based applications have become more and more popular. Their users record data during their daily routine or specifically for certain events. The application WideNoise Plus allows users to record sound samples and to annotate them with perceptions and tags. The app is being used to document and map the soundscape all over the world. The procedure of recording, including the assignment of tags, has to be as easy-to-use as possible. We therefore discuss the application of tag recommender algorithms in this particular scenario. We show, that this task is fundamentally different from the well-known tag recommendation problem in folksonomies as users do no longer tag fix resources but rather sensory data and impressions. The scenario requires efficient recommender algorithms that are able to run on the mobile device, since Internet connectivity cannot be assumed to be available. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of several tag recommendation algorithms and discuss their applicability in the mobile sensing use-case.

Mueller, J.; Doerfel, S.; Becker, M.; Hotho, A. & Stumme, G. (2013), Tag Recommendations for SensorFolkSonomies, in 'Recommender Systems and the Social Web Workshop at 7th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys 2013, Hong Kong, China -- October 12-16, 2013. Proceedings' , ACM, , pp. New York, NY, USA .
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2012

Atzmueller, M.; Becker, M.; Doerfel, S.; Kibanov, M.; Hotho, A.; Macek, B.-E.; Mitzlaff, F.; Mueller, J.; Scholz, C. & Stumme, G. (2012), Ubicon: Observing Social and Physical Activities, in 'IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, CPSCom 2012, Besançon, France, 20-23 November, 2012' , IEEE, Washington, DC, USA .
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The connection of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which is combining two prominent areas of computer science. In this paper, we tackle this topic from different angles: We describe data mining methods for ubiquitous and social data, specifically focusing on physical and social activities, and provide exemplary analysis results. Furthermore, we give an overview on the Ubicon platform which provides a framework for the creation and hosting of ubiquitous and social applications for diverse tasks and projects. Ubicon features the collection and analysis of both physical and social activities of users for enabling inter-connected applications in ubiquitous and social contexts. We summarize three real-world systems built on top of Ubicon, and exemplarily discuss the according mining and analysis aspects.

Atzmueller, M.; Becker, M.; Doerfel, S.; Kibanov, M.; Hotho, A.; Macek, B.-E.; Mitzlaff, F.; Mueller, J.; Scholz, C. & Stumme, G. (2012), Ubicon: Observing Social and Physical Activities, in 'Proc. 4th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom 2012)' .
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