Keynote Speakers

  • Andrew T. Campbell

    Professor of computer science
    Dartmouth College

    The StudentLife Project: Using Smartphones to Assess Sociability, Mental Health, and Academic Performance of College Students

    Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. The StudentLife continuous sensing app assesses the day-to-day and week-by-week impact of workload on stress, sleep, activity, mood, sociability, mental health and academic performance of a single class of 48 students across a 10 week term at Dartmouth College using Android phones. Results from the StudentLife study show a number of significant correlations between the automatic objective sensor data from smartphones and mental health and educational outcomes of the student body. We identify a Dartmouth term lifecycle in the data that shows students start the term with high positive affect and conversation levels, low stress, and healthy sleep and daily activity patterns. As the term progresses and the workload increases, stress appreciably rises while positive affect, sleep, conversation and activity drops off. We show how passive sensing data from phones can infer studying and partying behavior across the term. Finally, we show how a smartphone can automatically predict student GPA.

    Andrew T. Campbell is a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, where he leads the smartphone sensing group. His group developed a number of early sensing applications for smartphones and is currently focused on turning the everyday smartphone into a cognitive phone. Andrew received his Ph.D. in computer science (1996) from Lancaster University, England and the NSF Career Award (1999) for his research in programmable wireless networks. Before joining Dartmouth, he was a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University (1996-2005). Prior to that, he spent ten years in the software industry in the US and Europe leading the development of operating systems and wireless networks. Andrew has been a technical program chair of a number of conferences in his area including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc and ACM SenSys; also, he co-chaired the NSF sponsored workshop on pervasive computing at scale. Andrew spent his sabbatical year (2003-2004) at the computer laboratory, Cambridge University, as an UK EPSRC visiting fellow, and fall 2009 as a visiting professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain.

  • Usman Haque

    Founding partner of Umbrellium and Thingful.net

    In Praise of Messy Cities

    The "smart city" approach suggests we simply need appropriate and accurate monitoring equipment to reveal all the intricacies and complexities of a finite and knowable universe -- technology helps us do these things "better", so, the argument goes, we need more technology. Yet, cities are what Russell Ackoff might call a "mess". Every issue interrelates to and interacts with every other issue; there is no clear "solution"; there are no universal objective parameters; and sometimes those working on problems are actually the ones who are causing them. Urban data isn't simply discovered, it is invented, manipulated and crafted; and cities aren't 'solved', they are created through the actions, motivations and decisions of their citizen. This talk will discuss how we can, collaboratively, design cities and structure participation both online and offline, with specific reference to Usman's interactive environments, urban spectacles, collaboration platforms and other concrete examples.

    Usman Haque is founding partner of Umbrellium and Thingful.net, a search engine for the Internet of Things. Earlier, he launched the Internet of Things data infrastructure and community platform Pachube.com, which was acquired by LogMeIn in 2011. Trained as an architect, he has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and dozens of mass-participation initiatives throughout the world. His skills include the design and engineering of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He received the 2008 Design of the Year Award (interactive) from the Design Museum, UK, a 2009 World Technology Award (art), the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize.