Eyal Dim

The Influence of a Location-Aware Mobile Guide on Museum Visitors' Behavior

Many museums offer their visitors the use of a mobile guide to enhance their visit experience. Novel mobile guides have the potential to provide personalized, context-aware, rich content to museum visitors. However, they might also affect the way visitors behave and interact. While many studies have examined novel features that these guides can provide to enhance the visit experience, few have looked into the impact that a mobile guide might have on the actual behavior of the visitors. We describe a field study conducted with 403 actual museum visitors, over a period of 10 months comparing behaviors of visitors who used a mobile multimedia location-aware guide during their visit and that of visitors who did not use any electronic aid. Results indicate that visitors’ behavior was altered considerably when using a mobile guide. Visitors using a mobile guide visited the museum longer and were attracted to and spent more time at exhibits where they could get information from the guide. In addition, we provide empirical evidence of the decoupling effect that a mobile guide has on pairs of visitors. Using a mobile guide caused visitors to reduce proximity and to interact less with their fellow group members. Finally, we discuss what may be done to reduce this negative social effect.

Automatic Detection of Social Behavior of Museum Visitor Pairs

In many cases, visitors come to a museum in small groups. In such cases, the visitors’ social context has an impact on their museum visit experience. Knowing the social context may allow a system to provide socially aware services to the visitors. Evidence of the social context can be gained from observing/monitoring the visitors’ social behavior. However, automatic identification of a social context requires, on the one hand, identifying typical social behavior patterns and, on the other, using relevant sensors that measure various signals and reason about them to detect the visitors’ social behavior. We present such typical social behavior patterns of visitor pairs, identified by observations, and then the instrumentation, detection process, reasoning, and analysis of measured signals that enable us to detect the visitors’ social behavior. Simple sensors’ data, such as proximity to other visitors, proximity to museum points of interest, and visitor orientation are used to detect social synchronization, attention to the social companion, and interest in museum exhibits. The presented approach may allow future research to offer adaptive services to museum visitors based on their social context to support their group visit experience better.

When user modeling intersects software engineering: the info-bead user modeling approach

User models (UMs) allow systems to provide personalized services to their users. Nowadays, UMs are developed ad-hoc, as part of specific applications, thus requiring repetitive development efforts. In this paper, we propose the info-bead user modeling approach, which is based on ideas taken from software engineering in general and component-based software development in particular. The basic standalone unit, the info-bead, represents a single user attribute within time-tagged information-items. An info-bead encapsulates an inference process that uses data received from sensors or other info-beads and yields an information-item value. Having standard interfaces, info-beads can be linked, thus creating info-pendants. Both info-beads and info-pendants can be assembled as needed into complex and abstract user models (UMs) and group models (GMs). The goal of the suggested approach is to ease the modeling process and to allow reuse of info beads developed for one UM in other UMs that need the same information. In order to assess the reusability and collaboration capabilities of the info-bead user modeling approach, we developed a prototype tool that enables UM designers, who are not necessarily software developers, to easily select and integrate info-beads for constructing UMs and GMs. We further demonstrated the use of the approach in a museum environment, for modeling of assistive technology ontology and for user modeling in various specific domains. Finally, we analyzed and assessed the characteristics of the approach with respect to existing generic user modeling criteria.

IUI 2011 workshop on location awareness for mixed and dual reality (LAMDa)

The LAMDa workshop aims at discussing the impact of Dual Reality (DR) and Mixed Reality (MR) on location awareness and other applications in smart environments. Virtual environments - which are an essential part of dual and mixed realities - can be used to create new applications and to enhance already existing applications in the real world. On the other hand, existing sensors in the real world can be used to enhance the virtual world as well. The combination of both worlds can be well illustrated by location-based services, such as location-based advertising.

Info-Bead group modeling in a mobile scenario

The mobile scenario is an extremely challenging one when it comes to providing personalized, context aware services to mobile users. Users may dynamically and continuously enter and leave smart environments that may offer them relevant services. However, the environments may not know anything about the users and hence, providing personalized, context aware services becomes a challenge: users need to be identified, queried for their preferences and monitored before a service can be provided. The lack of standard, easy to use personalization infrastructure worsens the problem -- every service provider needs to build a proprietary, add-hoc user modeling component from scratch, thus to invest considerable effort in the task. This work builds on top of previous work on Info-Beads user modeling. Following past research, it suggests an Info-Beads approach for mobile user modeling for monitoring users and enabling standardization in building user models, reusing both components and data. The specific contribution is to allow monitoring mobile users, reasoning on their data and creating individual and group models from it. We demonstrate the ideas in the area of media content recommendations for groups and individual mobile users in smart environments, as a possible case study.

IUI 2013 3rd workshop on location awareness for mixed and dual reality: (LAMDa'13)

This workshop explores the interactions between location awareness and Dual/Mixed/PolySocial Reality in smart (instrumented) environments and their impact on culture and society. The main scope of this workshop is to explore how a Dual/Mixed/PolySocial Reality paradigm can be used to improve applications in smart environments and, by extension, which new possibilities can be opened up by these paradigms. These may include positioning methods and location-based services using the DR paradigm, such as navigation services and group interaction services (location-based social signal processing) as well as agent based intermediaries to offset errant voluminous multiplexed communication messaging. The workshop is also open to discuss sensor and actuator technologies that are being developed to foster the growth of interaction possibilities in smart environments.

2nd workshop on location awareness for mixed and dual reality (LAMDa'12)

The workshop explores the interactions between location awareness and Dual/Mixed Reality in smart environments and the impact on culture and society. The main scope of this workshop is: How can the Dual Reality paradigm be used to improve applications in smart environments and which new possibilities are opened up by these paradigms? This includes positioning methods and location-based services using the DR paradigm, such as navigation services and group interaction services (location-based social signal processing). The workshop is also open to discuss sensor and actuator technologies that may help to realize the synchronization of the virtual and real world. The main scope of this workshop is: How can the Dual Reality paradigm be used to improve location-based and socially-aware services and other applications in smart environments?