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Feb 2016: Mattia Gustarini’s PhD Defense

23 Feburary 2016, 10-12h, Battelle A-404/407, PhD Defence of Mattia Gustarini titled: “Analysing Smartphone Users’ “Inner-Self”: The Perception of Intimacy and Smartphone Usage Changes”.

PhD Candidate Mattia Gustarini

Thesis Title “Analysing Smartphone Users’ “Inner-Self”: The Perception of Intimacy and Smartphone Usage Changes”

Lay Summary To be more intelligent, mobile services and applications rely on users’ context, but we have not yet investigated how users perceive this context and how to leverage this perception to create even more intelligent services. To represent the perception of the context of users, we define users’ intimacy as their familiarity with their current place, the number of people and kind of people around them. According to the dictionary, the adjective ‘intimate’ describes the context (place or setting) as familiar, being private and comfortable. With a first user study, we validate the intimacy concept, we establish that users use mobile services differently in different intimacy situations, and we create a first theoretical model able to estimate the intimacy of users. With a second user study, we evaluate the accuracy of intimacy predictability in practice, we verify its limitations, and we propose different solutions addressing these limitations. Finally, we show how the intimacy concept can be leveraged in practice. It can be used for studies on users’ context or deployed by app developers (to automate services or create better UIX). Advertisers can use it to deliver their content at the right moment, and it can support the innovative projects, as Google Project Tango.

The Thesis Jury

Prof. Gilles Falquet (president of the jury)

Assoc. Prof. Katarzyna Wac (thesis director)

Prof. Dimitri Konstantas (thesis co-director)

Prof. François Grey (internal examiner)

Prof. Anind K. Dey, Carnegie Mellon University, USA (external examiner)

Prof. Effie Lai-Chong Law, University of Leicester, UK (external examiner)

Thesis Defense Location/Time University of Geneva, Battelle A-404/407, 10-12h