What if a mobile game maker could determine the “who, when, and where” that lead to the most satisfying gaming experience? What if they knew precise combination of demographics, location, and recent activities—say young men, in their dorm room, after a meal—that yields the highest satisfaction with their game? Armed with such precise data, the company could push incentives and promote new games to the right people at the right time and place.
This level of data specificity would require granular location data, coupled with mechanisms to match demographic data with dynamic activity detection. Perfecting any one of these components would be a major research project in itself. Putting them together and making them operational in real-world environments would seem a near impossible task. But it’s exactly what researchers at the Singapore Management University’s School of Information Systems are striving for with their LiveLabs Urban Lifestyle Innovation Platform (LiveLabs, for short), a mobile experimentation test-bed deployed across the campus.
According to Rajesh Balan (opens in new tab), the principal investigator and co-director of LiveLabs, the goal is to allow in-situ, real-time experimentation of mobile applications and services that require context-specific triggers—all based on real participants using their personal smart phones. As of March 2015, more than 3,000 students had signed up with LiveLabs, and several hundred were active users.
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The LiveLabs closed-loop experimentation cycle
The diagram above shows the project’s overall vision. It starts with the collection of sensor and contextual data from a participant’s smart phone (with the participants’ permission, of course). This data is then fused with other data streams, such as location and activity type, to deduce the current user context: determining, for example, that the user is standing outside a store or is with a group of friends. The project team then employs an experiment-creation interface (shown below), in order to determine if the data provides sufficient contextual triggers to warrant sending an experiment, in the form of a customized notification, to the participant’s phone. The investigators then collect data on what the participant actually did after receiving the experiment, using this data to test their hypothesis and improve the system’s efficacy.
Step 1: Participant data is processed in the experiment-creation interface.
Step 2: Experiment is sent to user’s phone.
Step 3: Report is compiled after experiment has been run.
Microsoft Research has provided support for LiveLabs, including an award from Microsoft Research Asia to collaborate on indoor location techniques. “The LiveLabs team has a close relationship and long-standing history of collaboration with Microsoft Research,” says Balan. He notes that members of the LiveLabs team regularly visit Microsoft Research labs in Redmond (Washington), Beijing, and India to present their latest research innovations and engage with Microsoft researchers on shared initiatives.
“Many portions of LiveLabs research and deployment—including indoor location tracking, sensing technologies and algorithms, behavioral analytics, and power management—overlap with the agenda of Microsoft researchers,” Balan adds. Jacky Shen of the Wireless and Networking Group at Microsoft Research Asia agrees. “We’re seeing lots of moves in the indoor localization research area. It’s essential for mobile sensing, mobile multimedia, and more general mobile Internet.”
Balan hopes to expand LiveLabs beyond the university campus. “The university campus gives us a good starting point,” he says, but he notes that broader public participation is necessary to adequately test the research theory and model. “We’ve started to look into a large convention center, a commercial airport, or a resort island,” he adds.
Balan is also is looking into further integrating LiveLabs with the Internet of Things, working with Arjmand Samuel from Microsoft Research Redmond. As Balan observed during a recent talk at Microsoft Research Asia, “We can provide access to the LiveLabs experimentation capabilities to any interested Microsoft researchers. In addition, we are very open to further research and professional engagements with Microsoft Research.”
That sentiment runs in both directions, as Microsoft Research is eager to promote collaboration with academics who share our vision of using technology to help solve global challenges.
—Winnie Cui, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research
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