Abstract-The location tracking functionality of modern mobile devices provides unprecedented opportunity to the understanding of individual mobility in daily life. Instead of studying raw geographic coordinates, we are interested in understanding human mobility patterns based on sequences of place visits which encode, at a coarse resolution, most daily activities. This paper presents a study on place characterization in people's everyday life based on data recorded continuously by smartphones. First, we study human mobility from sequences of place visits, including visiting patterns on different place categories. Second, we address the problem of automatic place labeling from smartphone data without using any geo-location information. Our study on a large-scale data collected from 114 smartphone users over 18 months confirms many intuitions, and also reveals findings regarding both regularly and novelty trends in visiting patterns. Considering the problem of place labeling with 10 place categories, we show that frequently visited places can be recognized reliably (over 80%) while it is much more challenging to recognize infrequent places.

This paper presents an overview of the Mobile Data Challenge (MDC), a large-scale research initiative aimed at generating innovations around smartphone-based research, as well as community-based evaluation of mobile data analysis methodologies. First, we review the Lausanne Data Collection Campaign (LDCC) -an initiative to collect unique, longitudinal smartphone data set for the MDC. Then, we introduce the Open and Dedicated Tracks of the MDC; describe the specific data sets used in each of them; discuss the key design and implementation aspects introduced in order to generate privacypreserving and scientifically relevant mobile data resources for wider use by the research community; and summarize the main research trends found among the 100+ challenge submissions. We finalize by discussing the main lessons learned from the participation of several hundred researchers worldwide in the MDC Tracks.

Human behavior is often complex and context-dependent. This paper presents a general technique to exploit this "multidimensional" contextual variable for human mobility prediction. We use an ensemble method, in which we extract different mobility patterns with multiple models and then combine these models under a probabilistic framework. The key idea lies in the assumption that human mobility can be explained by several mobility patterns that depend on a subset of the contextual variables and these can be learned by a simple model. We showed how this idea can be applied to two specific online prediction tasks: what is the next place a user will visit? and how long will he stay in the current place?. Using smartphone data collected from 153 users during 17 months, we show the potential of our method in predicting human mobility in real life.

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Human mobility prediction is an important problem which has a large number of applications, especially in context-aware services. This paper presents a study on location prediction using smartphone data, in which we address modeling and application aspects. Building personalized location prediction models from smartphone data remains a technical challenge due to data sparsity, which comes from the complexity of human behavior and the typically limited amount of data available for individual users. To address this problem, we propose an approach based on kernel density estimation, a popular smoothing technique for sparse data. Our approach contributes to existing work in two ways. First, our proposed model can estimate the probability that a user will be at a given location at a specific time in the future, by using both spatial and temporal information via multiple kernel functions. Second, we also show how our probabilistic framework extends to a more practical task of location prediction for a time window in the future. Our approach is validated on an everyday life location datasets consisting of 133 smartphone users. Our method reaches an accuracy of 84% for the next hour, and an accuracy of 77% for the next three hours.

There is an increasing interest in analyzing social interaction from mobile sensor data, and smartphones are rapidly becoming the most attractive sensing option. We propose a new probabilistic relational model to analyze long-term dynamic social networks created by physical proximity of people. Our model can infer different interaction types from the network, revealing the participants of a given group interaction, and discovering a variety of social contexts. Our analysis is conducted on Bluetooth data sensed with smartphones for over one year on the life of 40 individuals related by professional or personal links. We objectively validate our model by studying its predictive performance, showing a significant advantage over a recently proposed model.

This paper presents a large-scale analysis of contextualized smartphone usage in real life. We introduce two contextual variables that condition the use of smartphone applications, namely places and social context. Our study shows strong dependencies between phone usage and the two contextual cues, which are automatically extracted based on multiple built-in sensors available on the phone. By analyzing continuous data collected on a set of 77 participants from a European country over 9 months of actual usage, our framework automatically reveals key patterns of phone application usage that would traditionally be obtained through manual logging or questionnaire. Our findings contribute to the large-scale understanding of applications and context, bringing out design implications for interfaces on smartphones.

Abstract-By exploiting built-in sensors, mobile smartphone have become attractive options for large-scale sensing of human behavior as well as social interaction. In this paper, we present a new probabilistic model to analyze longitudinal dynamic social networks created by the physical proximity of people sensed continuously by the phone Bluetooth sensors. A new probabilistic model is proposed in order to jointly infer emergent grouping modes of the community together with their temporal context. We present experimental results on a Bluetooth proximity network sensed with mobile smart-phones over 9 months of continuous real-life, and show the effectiveness of our method.