Article: The machines are talking

Are you listening?

There is a constant silent sound from all the machines out there. They are speaking to us, but are we listening to them? I believe that there are a lot of interesting facts and insights that we can gain if we just start to listen to the bits and bytes that are continuously passing by us. There is ample opportunity to better understand society from the data it generates. 

Actual app usage patterns from a general population or from a particular type of location, such as schools, travel hubs, restaurants etc., brings forth insights of real users needs. If these needs can be optimized, so – I believe – will the quality of experience. Although there may be no connectivity, nor app coverage, in a particular location, we do know that people follow trends. For example, we can reasonably assume that if people in one school like to use applications categorized as “tools,” we can safely assume the same applications are also needed in another school, from which we don’t have any data.

Studying the demand and usage in a particular location is often referred to as a “spatial demand.” Likewise, one can study time-specific usage. This would be referred to as “temporal needs.” If we then combine local and time demands, we can categorize this as a “spatio-temporal demand.”

With the year-long data trace, information was collected from a couple of thousand test users, from 120 different countries, The users provided their automatically generated feedback by way of a background process running on a mobile app,available on Google Play. From this study, we have been able to demonstrate that there is, in fact, a spatio-temporal effect on mobile app usage patterns. Our study is summarized in an article presented at NGMAST 2014 and now available on IEEE Xplore.