Science and Industry

From conference to conference, the travels continue. This time I’m attending the ending conference of EU Kids Online II, a big project focused on what children do in the Internet. I’ve studied children and families previously, and therefore interested in the recent developments in this field. And, compared to any study I can conduct, this research program provides a statistically valid dataset of 25 000 + families and children across Europe. And, yes, they are in the process of publishing this data for individual researchers, like me.

Well, I don’t attend conferences just to get one SPSS-file, there more in this. I’m currently working with Nokia to solve some of the threats and risks caused by children’s using Internet and connected context-aware handheld devices, or simply put: mobile phones and other gadgets. Based on my current understanding of this phenomenon, the key tools are to increase mediation with parents and peers and to develop media literacy and coping skills in this new World2.0.

As well pointed out by Kuno Sorensen: as we teach our children on traffic and correct behaviors there, we should teach the basics of mediated environments and communication in same way. And, I believe this can be achieved by increasing the interactions and guidance children receive when growing up.

Now you ask: “Well, Matti – that model is a nice sounding idea, but does that really happen … or is this just a daydream?” That is a good point, and requiring evidence is only sensible thing to do. I don’t know if mediation and support affect on the experiences of harm, it sounds valid and sound. But, after getting my hands on the File, I can run some of statistical analysis and see, if this makes sense with data too.

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.

We, as in me and some my friends, got a permission to organize a workshop in MobileCHI 2011. The theme is around mobile devices, children and families. For more details of the workshop, see our workshop blog.

But, why this topic? Why to care of the children? Well, as the studies, such as EU Kids Online, have shown, even pre-teen children use more and more of ‘multimedia’ features of devices, such as cameras, apps and the Internet.

This gives interesting opportunities in various fields, such as safety, education, … But also threads are there, such as being exposed to porn((Actually, my strangest memory ever was when being in Assembly-event and some children asked if our mobile phones had filtering software on them.)) to cases such as bullying  or hover-parenting.

The technology around us is changing once again and the question is that what will society do. This is why more and deeper research is needed. As the Portal song says: “There’s research to be done.”