Science and Industry

After attending the Mobile HCI 2011, it is time to summarize some of the experiences I had there — and let’s start with the most interesting paper I listened: Falling Asleep with Angry Birds, Facebook and Kindle — A Large Scale Study on Mobile Application Usage by Böhmer et al. (2011).

As we all know, the mobile application market has boomed, mainly due to iOS and Anrdoid-systems and the online market places they have. However, what I haven’t seen yet is a study on the application use and lifetime in a more broad manner. I remember seeing in an paper in the Pervasive 2010 about one game and the usage patterns of it. But, we don’t know so much on how the applications are used, in what situations they are used and more focused, why are they used. We know… they are used.

Böhmer et al. suggest a new sensor type called appsensor, only to focus on application and use of them. This allows us to go deeper in the use, just seeing what applications are popular at what time and what places — like done in the paper. Naturally, one can figure out more uses for appsensors — self organizing maps, data mining, … all the cool applications. Maybe I briefly highlight some aspects observed in this study to demonstrate the value.

Firstly, the sample is based on 4 000 something Android users, mostly from the states. They use all applications about one hour per day, and an average time application is opend… is 72 seconds. Short time… The core functionalities of traditional phones are used even more shortly: communication 47 seconds, maps 45 seconds, productivity — like calender — 61 secs. The “new” emerging things, multimedia, browsers, games, lifestyle apps, clearly are in the better side: 83 secs, 74 secs, 114 secs and 168 secs.

There are spikes when specific application categories become more important: tools category is popular around 6 am to 8 am, communication apps dominate the use 11 am till 8 pm and games are played during the evening. And location affects this too, some apps are popular in airports, and there are differences between Europeans and US users.

In general, what the results indicate is that we can build smarter smartphones. Instead of being a multipurpose device, it seems that certain patterns exists and the next step would be to facilitate these. And, for science — now this data was anonymized, can more data of users make us see even more. Especially this data is important, as similar kind of data surely exists in the HQs of Apple, Google and Nokia: we need to understand what that means as a privacy question.

For me, the Internet has always been an interesting research object. One of the main reasons for my view has been the fact that data already exists and it is easily available. Compared to the normal methods of social scientists, interview, statistical data collection – the data just lies in the Web available for analysis and interpretation.

However, I’ve now started focusing on the ethics of research. I do know the world around us, particulally the US, is way ahead in this area. The situation here in Finland is somewhat more open: in social sciences we do not have ethics review committees and therefore role of researcher is more important when choosing whether something can and should be done.

Unluckily, my master’s degree doesn’t include any research ethics. I don’t know the situation in other universities, but I do assume that real talk of research ethics starts in post-graduate studies. So, here’s some good hints for those still working with the Master’s degree and planning to analyze something related to online life – this may be blogs, IRC-channels, communities, websites, …

The first thing one should check is the Association of Internet Researchers’ ethical guideline (2002). The guideline provides a set of questions relevant for making decisions, however it does not provide many practical hints. For those, one needs to search the extensive literature, also collected in the ethical guideline.

One reference I’ve used is Sharf ‘s (1999) observations. She has five guides for everyone studying online communities:

1. the effects of the research should be evaluated throughout the research period
2. the researcher should inform the community about his research and the purposes of it
3. researcher should get consent from the participants
4. the participants should be allowed to review and comment the research
5. the privacy and wellbeing of the virtual community should be maintained even during the research

These outline rather well the special nature of Internet research: you may be observing people who do not know they are being observed, like they are among friends. The community may include topics participants are not comfortable to discuss if their identity is known by wider audience. So, us, as researchers should make sure that we do not hurt the communities and the people we aim to study.

As noted in this blog, I resigned from Nokia a few months ago. I finished my Master’s thesis in political sciences at the University of Helsinki and continued studying computer sciences in Helsinki. For example I did some Windows Phone 7 coding.

However, now I’m again working in the ICT domain, in the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Aalto-university. As a Finnish man, I’m required to either do military or non-military service, from 6 months to 12 months of duty. I’ve selected the non-military service and HIIT was kind enough to provide me a position for this duty.

My current work focuses in political participation and voting advice applications (more of these some day, hopefully…), children and media and further inquiry to playfulness as a design concept. And, maybe some other tasks also.