Relativistic perspective in socio-physical monitoring: study on children behavior in educational group settings

Abstract

The user-centric sensor-rich monitoring is rapidly evolving, introducing many continuous personal sensing applications and further contributing to the computational approaches to large-scale social understanding. Yet, personal sensing applications still involves much complexity and vulnerability in interpreting the continuous sensory data under dynamically progressing situations. These challenges cause additional cognitive burden to the human observers and ambiguity to the applications leveraging the sensory data. In this thesis, I newly propose the notion of relativistic perspective in socio-physical monitoring; given that an individual activity is actually a part of group activity shared by multiple people in proximity, also known as in a socio-physical setting, I conjecture that there could be opportunities of rich interpretation on the individual sensory data by leveraging the sensory data from these people in the socio-physical setting. In light of this, I devise relativity representations of a group in a socio-physical setting by factorizing their sensory data into the commonality and the individual differentials with respect to it. As an initial study to explore the relativistic perspective, the main body of this thesis focuses on a specific exemplary socio-physical setting around us, the children in kindergarten activities. These children continuously share their interactions and experiences, and grow along similar developmental stages. Following the longitudinal preliminary motivational studies, this thesis presents the relativistic perspective in sensor-rich behavior monitoring on the children, incorporating diverse educatory settings in regular kindergarten activities and qualitative user studies evaluating the effects and implication on the human observer. To this end, this thesis presents three extensive field studies conducted with a class of 4-year-old children in a real kindergarten. First, as a cornerstone, we explore the inter-child behavi...