Henri ter Hofte

Sociosensor: An extensible toolkit for capturing social phenomena with mobile devices

Biography
Dr.ir. G.H (Henri) ter Hofte has been a researcher at the Telematica Instituut since 1993. His research interests range from social to technical subjects, and include the role of context information in informal communication, social translucence, social network analysis, presence and instant messaging, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), groupware, distributed object computing and peer-to-peer architectures. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Twente in 1998. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled “Working Apart Together: Foundations for Component Groupware”.

Currently, in the Freeband project User eXperience (FRUX), he is responsible for the exploration, evaluation and further development of the Sociosensor. Before FRUX, Henri ter Hofte has been the lead researcher and chief designer of Live Contacts, a new mobile availability service based on research into the role of context information in informal communication between knowledge workers. Earlier, Henri managed the design and implementation of CoCoWare .NET, a free and open architecture and platform for component-based groupware that supports end-user composition. The CoCoWare .NET Platform was developed in the GigaCSCW project, the CSCW research project of GigaPort, the Dutch Next generation Internet applications research program. Henri organized various workshops on CSCW and ECSCW conferences and recently served on the programme committee of the workshop SID2004 (Social Intelligence Design 2004).

Position Paper
Man is a social being, continuously and dynamically adapting to his social context, and increasingly supported by advances in mobile technology. Current research into context-aware computing stresses the relevance of using context information in social-centric applications in order to improve desirable properties such as social translucence (see for example, Erickson & Kellogg, 2000; Schilit, Hilbert, & Trevor, 2002). The massive success of context-mediating applications such as Instant Messaging (De Vos, ter Hofte, & de Poot, 2004) is a further testimony to the importance of using context information in social centric applications. However, despite such occasional design successes, researchers are still lacking a systematic understanding which context information is relevant in what kind of situation and which kind of services. At the same time designers of social-centric applications such as context-aware communication and computing services face design issues like: selecting which context information should be conveyed or aggregated to other human users, and selecting which context information can be interpreted reliably enough by computers.

We believe that mobile devices should not only be exploited as a vehicle to deliver information and communication applications, but also as an instrument for the scientific investigation into the dynamics of social phenomena. Mobile devices tend to travel along with people wherever they are and whatever they are doing, and consequently enter various social contexts of that person (e.g., being together with colleagues, with family members, with other commuters, or with other team sport members). This literally puts these devices in an ideal position to capture several aspects of social phenomena.

In the project FRUX (Freeband User Experience), we are currently designing and implementing Sociosensor, an extensible toolkit that exploits the hardware sensors and software capabilities of contemporary mobile devices such as PDAs and smartphones to capture objective data about the dynamics of social interaction and social context together with subjective data about social experiences.

In particular, we will focus on building software-based sensors (sensor modules) that can capture objective data about the social context factors proximity (who is near?), communication (who is communicating with whom, for how long, using which communication media?) and relation (is A on the contact list of B and/or vice versa?, do A and B have shared contacts?), using device technologies currently widely available to programmers of smart mobile client applications that run on PDAs and smartphones, such as Infrared, Bluetooth, WLAN, audio microphone, GPS, GSM cell-ID, phone/E-mail/IM logs, contact lists and speed dial entries. In addition to the sensorware that logs objective information, we will implement experience sampling software (Csikszentmihalyhi et al., 1987) that can be used to query the user at multiple pseudo-random times for subjective information such as opinions and feelings.

Thus, we provide the social sciences with an instrument to gain a much deeper, detailed and dynamic insight into these phenomena and their relations, which in turn can inform the design of successful social-centric applications.

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