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.

This paper applies subgroup discovery for obtaining interesting descriptive patterns in ubiquitous data. Furthermore, we provide a novel graph-based analysis approach for assessing the relations between the obtained subgroup set, and for ranking subgroups according to their relationships to other subgroups. We present and discuss first results utilizing real-world data, given by noise measurements with associated subjective perceptions and a set of tags describing the semantic context.

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.

<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>

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.

<p>The lexicons of human languages organize their units at two distinct levels. At a first combinatorial level, meaningless forms (typically referred to as phonemes) are combined into meaningful units (typically referred to as morphemes). Thanks to this, many morphemes can be obtained by relatively simple combinations of a small number of phonemes. At a second compositional level of the lexicon, morphemes are composed into larger lexical units, the meaning of which is related to the individual meanings of the composing morphemes. This duality of patterning is not a necessity for lexicons and the question remains wide open regarding how a population of individuals is able to bootstrap such a structure and the evolutionary advantages of its emergence. Here we address this question in the framework of a multi-agents model, where a population of individuals plays simple naming games in a conceptual environment modeled as a graph. We demonstrate that errors in communication as well as a blending repair strategy, which crucially exploits a shared conceptual representation of the environment, are sufficient conditions for the emergence of duality of patterning, that can thus be explained in a pure cultural way. Compositional lexicons turn out to be faster to lead to successful communication than purely combinatorial lexicons, suggesting that meaning played a crucial role in the evolution of language.</p>

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.

In the last few years the Web has been progressively acquiring the status of an infrastructure for “social computing” that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in online communities, and steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social-sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. This paper introduces Experimental Tribe (ET), a novel general purpose web-based platform for social computation.

This paper presents an approach for modeling location-based profiles of social image media based on tagging information and collaborative geo-reference annotations. We utilize pattern mining techniques for obtaining sets of tags that are specific for the specified point, landmark, or region of interest. Next, we show how these candidate patterns can be presented and visualized for interactive exploration using a combination of general pattern mining visualizations and views specialized on geo-referenced tagging data. We present a case study using publicly available data from the Flickr photo sharing application.

The Category Game is a multi-agent model that accounts for the emergence of shared categorization patterns in a population of interacting individuals. In the framework of the model, linguistic categories appear as long lived consensus states that are constantly reshaped and re-negotiated by the communicating individuals. It is therefore crucial to investigate the long time behavior to gain a clear understanding of the dynamics. However, it turns out that the evolution of the emerging category system is so slow, already for small populations, that such an analysis has remained so far impossible. Here, we introduce a fast no-rejection algorithm for the Category Game that disentangles the physical simulation time from the CPU time, thus opening the way for thorough analysis of the model. We verify that the new algorithm is equivalent to the old one in terms of the emerging phenomenology and we quantify the CPU performances of the two algorithms, pointing out the neat advantages offered by the no-rejection one. This technical advance has already opened the way to new investigations of the model, thus helping to shed light on the fundamental issue of categorization.

The paper describes a platform developed by the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) group at University College London over the past five years to facilitate online data capture by Citizen Scientists in the context of community science, where local environmental problems are monitored. Responding to user needs, the platform has been developed to be as flexible as possible in terms of the types of data that can be captured -- these currently include numbers, text, video, photography, pull-down lists, multiple selection lists and so forth. Live data feeds and links to social networking such as twitter have also been incorporated. This platform is database-centric, and thus allows capture and storage of data from multiple devices (currently Web and mobile) in one central location. All map-based data is captured and held in native spatial data format inside the database. To support Citizen Science activity, the system has been designed to allow new projects to be added without the requirement for additional development (programming), and an administration tool developed to support this task. Each project is allocated custom themes depending on the project requirements and a variety of 'skins' can be configured to give the website a different appearance in each case. The platform is currently used by over 20 different groups within the United Kingdom -- though mostly for more social and perceptual data collection, rather than scientific. After demonstrating its use in an urban noise study, it is now adapted to use in air pollution studies. An extension to mobile devices (Android) is also underdevelopment.