Ubiquitous Human Computation
KSE 801Uichin Lee
Outline
• Papers today: – Crowd-Sourced Sensing and Collaboration Using
Twitter, WoWMOM 2010 – Earthquake Shakes Twitter User:
Analyzing Tweets for Real-Time Event Detection, WWW 2010
• Understand the potential of ubiquitous human computation (+social networking)
Crowd-Sourced Sensing and Collaboration Using Twitter
Murat Demirbas, Murat Ali Bayir, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Yavuz Selim Yilmaz
SUNY BuffaloWoWMOM 2010
Slides are based on http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~demirbas/presentations/twitter.pdf
Cellphones!
• 3-4B cellphone users worldwide
• 1.13 billion phones sold in 2009 (36 per sec) vs 0.3 billion PCs
• 174M were smartphones– 15% (up from 12.8% in 2008)– Expected to exceed # feature
phones
Status quo in cellphones
• Each device connects to the Internet – to download/upload data and – to accomplish a task that does not require
collaboration and coordination
What is missing?
• An infrastructure to assist mobile users to perform collaboration and coordination ubiquitously
• Any user should be able to search & aggregate the data published by other users in a region
Our goal
• To provide a crowdsourced sensing and collaboration service using Twitter
• To enable aggregation and sharing of data; dynamically assign sensing tasks to other cellphone users
Why Twitter?
• Open publish-subscribe system: 105 million users, over 30 million users in US, 55 million tweets 600 million search queries everyday
• Each tweet has 140 char limit• Twitter provides an open source search API and a
REST API (that enables developers to access tweets, timelines, and user data)
• Different actors may integrate published data differently and can offer new services in unanticipated ways
Crowdsourcing architecture
Sensweet
• Employs the smartphone’s ability to work in the background without distracting a mobile user– Sense the surrounding environment and send the resulting
data to Twitter • To search and process sensor values on Twitter, we
need to agree on a standard for publishing these sensor readings– Bio-code: Uses Twitter bio sections & allows users to search
for the sensors they are looking for on-the-fly– TweetML: Uses pre-defined hashtags to improve
searchability
Askweet
• Accepts a question from Twitter – tries to answer the question using the data on
Twitter, potentially data published by Sensweets– if that is not possible, Askweet finds experts on
Twitter and forwards the question to these experts (not clear how this was done in the paper)
• Parallelizable, easy to “cloudify” for scalable service provisioning
Applications
1. Crowdsourced weather2. Noise map application3. Location-based queries (with Foursquare)
1. Crowdsourced weather
• Current weather, everybody on Twitter can be an expert
• Question to Askweet: “?Weather Loc:Buffalo,NY”• Forwarded question:“How is the weather there now?
reply 0 for sunny, 1 for cloudy, 2 for rainy, and 3 for snowy
http://ubicomp.cse.buffalo.edu/rainradar
Experimental results for NYC in different
time slices
2. Noise map application
• Implemented a Sensweet client for the Nokia N97 Smartphone series
• Sensweet client detects a noise level of the surrounding environment and forwards this data to Twitter in the TweetML format
• Sound sample is classified into: Low, Medium, High state– Each level is modeled using normal distribution– Input signal is compared with 3 distributions (Low,
Medium, and High)
Noise map application
Noise levels for a user
3. Location based queries
• Factual vs. non-factual queries– Factual: “hotels in Miami”– Non-factual: “Anyone knows any cheap, good
hotel, price ranges between 100 to 200 dollars in Miami?” • Traditional search engine performs poorly!
• Significant fraction of location-based queries (in Twitter) is non-factual– e.g., 63% of the queries were non-factual, while only 37%
of them were factual (manual classification of 269 queries)Crowdsourcing Location-based Queries, Bulut et al., Pervasive Collaboration and Social Networking, 2011
http://www.percom.org/proceedings/workshops/papers/p490-bulut.pdf
Location based queries
• Aardvark uses a social network of the asker to find suitable answerers for the query and forwards this query to the answerers, and returns any answer back to the asker.
• How about Twitter + Foursquare?– Use Foursquare to determine users
that frequent the queried locale and that have interests on the queried category (e.g., food, nightlife)
– Find a right set of people to ask!
[Questions to be asked]
[Users]
[Valid questions] [Valid answers]
[Questions detected] [Answer detected]
[Answer to be forwarded]Moderator
Asker
tweet starting with ?keyword checking (anyone,
suggestion, where)
label the category and quality of questions
forwards validated questions to appropriate people (using
Twitter bio or Foursquare info)
Constantly polling Twitter account to check answers
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Experiment Setup
• Question dataset consists of 269 questions that the system collected over Twitter and validated as acceptable by the moderators.
• Manually categorize questions as factual and nonfactual: 63% - non-factual; 37% factual
• Some examples of questions for each type.
Foursquare Reply Rate vs. Random User Reply Rate Foursquare
Response Time
• 13 minutes median response time which is comparable with Aardvark
• 50% of the answers were received within the first 20 minutes.
Earthquake Shakes Twitter User:Analyzing Tweets for Real-Time Event Detection
Takehi Sakaki Makoto Okazaki Yutaka Matsuo@tksakaki @okazaki117 @ymatsuo
Tokyo UniversityWWW 2010 Conference
What’s happening?
• Twitter– is one of the most popular microblogging services– has received much attention recently
• Microblogging – is a form of blogging
• that allows users to send brief text updates
– is a form of micromedia• that allows users to send photographs or audio clips
• In this research, we focus on an important characteristic real-time nature
Real-time Nature of Microblogging
– Twitter users write tweets several times in a single day.– There is a large number of tweets, which results in many
reports related to events
– We can know how other users are doing in real-time– We can know what happens around other users in real-time.
social events parties baseball games presidential campaign
disastrous events storms fires traffic jams riots heavy rain-falls earthquakes
Our Goals
• propose an algorithm to detect a target event– do semantic analysis on Tweet
• to obtain tweets on the target event precisely
– regard Twitter user as a sensor• to detect the target event• to estimate location of the target
• produce a probabilistic spatio-temporal model for – event detection– location estimation
• propose Earthquake Reporting System using Japanese tweets
Twitter and Earthquakes in Japan
a map of earthquake occurrences world wide
a map of Twitter userworld wide
The intersection is regions with many earthquakes and large twitter users.
Twitter and Earthquakes in Japan
Other regions: Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, Italy, and Pacific coastal US cities
Event detection algorithms
• do semantic analysis on Tweet – to obtain tweets on the target event precisely
• regard Twitter user as a sensor– to detect the target event– to estimate location of the target
Semantic Analysis on Tweet• Search tweets including keywords related to a
target event– Example: In the case of earthquakes
• “shaking”, “earthquake”
• Classify tweets into a positive class or a negative class– Example:
• “Earthquake right now!!” --- positive• “Someone is shaking hands with my boss” --- negative
– Create a classifier
Semantic Analysis on Tweet
• Create classifier for tweets– use Support Vector Machine(SVM)
• Features (Example: I am in Japan, earthquake right now!)– A: Statistical features (7 words, the 5th word) the number of words in a tweet message and the position of the query
within a tweet
– B: Keyword features ( I, am, in, Japan, earthquake, right, now) the words in a tweet
– C: Word context features (Japan, right) the words before and after the query word
Tweet as Sensor Data
・・・ ・・・ ・・・tweets
・・・・・・
Probabilistic model
Classifier
observation by sensorsobservation by twitter users
target event target object
Probabilistic model
values
Event detection from twitter Object detection in ubiquitous environment
the correspondence between tweets processing andsensor data processing for event detection
Tweet as Sensor Data
some users posts“earthquake right now!!”
some earthquake sensors
responses positive value
We can apply methods for sensory data detection to tweets processing
・・・ ・・・ ・・・tweets
Probabilistic model
Classifier
observation by sensorsobservation by twitter users
target event target object
Probabilistic model
values
Event detection from twitter Object detection in ubiquitous environment
・・・・・・
search and classify them into
positive class
detect an earthquake
detect an earthquake
earthquake occurrence
Tweet as Sensor Data• We make two assumptions to apply methods for observation by
sensors
• Assumption 1: Each Twitter user is regarded as a sensor– a tweet → a sensor reading– a sensor detects a target event and makes a report probabilistically– Example:
• make a tweet about an earthquake occurrence• “earthquake sensor” return a positive value
• Assumption 2: Each tweet is associated with time and location info– time : posting timestamp– location : GPS data or location information in user’s profile
By processing time and location information, we can detect target events and find events’ locations
Probabilistic Model
• Why we need probabilistic models?– Sensor readings are noisy and sometimes sensors work
incorrectly– We cannot judge whether a target event occurred or not
from a single tweet– We have to calculate the probability of an event
occurrence from a series of data
• We propose probabilistic models for– event detection from time-series data– location estimation from a series of spatial information
Temporal Model
• We must calculate the probability of an event occurrence from a set of sensor readings
• We examine the actual time-series data to create a temporal model
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Temporal Model with Exponential Dist. Example: Earthquake and Typhoon
Spatial Model
• We must calculate the probability distribution of location of a target
• We apply Bayes filters to this problem which are often used in location estimation by sensors– Kalman Filters– Particle Filters
Bayesian Filters for Location Estimation
• Kalman Filters– are the most widely used variant of Bayes filters– approximate the probability distribution which is
virtually identical to a uni-modal Gaussian representation
– advantages: computational efficiency– disadvantages: limited to accurate sensors or
sensors with high update rates
Bayesian Filters for Location Estimation
• Particle Filters– represent the probability distribution by sets of samples, or
particles– advantages: able to represent arbitrary probability densities
• particle filters can converge to the true posterior even in non-Gaussian, nonlinear dynamic systems.
– disadvantages: difficult to apply to high-dimensional estimation problems
Information Diffusion Related to Real-time Events
• Proposed spatiotemporal models need to meet one condition that– sensors are assumed to be independent
• We check if information diffusions about target events happen because– if an information diffusion happened among users,
Twitter user sensors are not independent, they affect each other (correlation!)
Information Diffusion Related to Real-time Events
Nintendo DS Game an earthquake a typhoonInformation Flow Networks on Twitter
In the case of an earthquake and a typhoon, very little information diffusion takes place on Twitter, compared to Nintendo DS Game→ We assume that Twitter user sensors are independent about earthquakes and typhoons
Experiments and Evaluation
• We demonstrate performances of– tweet classification– event detection from time-series data → show this result in “application”– location estimation from a series of spatial
information
Evaluation of Semantic Analysis
• Queries– Earthquake query: “shaking” and “earthquake”– Typhoon query:”typhoon”
• Examples to create classifier– 597 positive examples
Evaluation of Semantic Analysis
• We obtain highest F-value when we use Statistical features and all features.
• Keyword features and Word Context features don’t contribute much to the classification performance
• A user becomes surprised and might produce a very short tweet
• It’s apparent that the precision is not so high as the recall
Features Recall Precision F-Value
Statistical 87.50% 63.64% 73.69%Keywords 87.50% 38.89% 53.85%Context 50.00% 66.67% 57.14%All 87.50% 63.64% 73.69%
Evaluation of Spatial Estimation• Target events
– earthquakes• 25 earthquakes from August.2009 to October 2009
– typhoons• name: Melor
• Baseline methods– weighed average
• simply takes the average of latitudes and longitudes
– median• simply takes the median of latitudes and longitudes
• Metric: distance from an epicenter – The smaller the better!
Evaluation of Spatial Estimation
Tokyo
Osaka
actual earthquake center
Kyoto
estimation by median
estimation by particle filter
balloon: each tweets color : post time
Evaluation of Spatial Estimation
Typhoon
Discussions of Experiments
• Particle filter performs better than other methods• If the center of a target event is in an oceanic area,
it’s more difficult to locate it precisely from tweets• It becomes more difficult to make good estimation in
less populated areas
Results of Earthquake DetectionJMA intensity scale 2 or more 3 or more 4 or more
Num of earthquakes 78 25 3Detected 70(89.7%) 24(96.0%) 3(100.0%)
Promptly detected* 53(67.9%) 20(80.0%) 3(100.0%)
Promptly detected: detected in a minutesJMA intensity scale: the original scale of earthquakes by Japan Meteorology Agency
Period: Aug.2009 – Sep. 2009Tweets analyzed : 49,314 tweetsPositive tweets : 6291 tweets by 4218 users
We detected 96% of earthquakes that were stronger than scale 3 or more during the period.
Conclusion
• We investigated the real-time nature of Twitter for event detection
• Semantic analyses were applied to tweets classification • We consider each Twitter user as a sensor and set a problem to
detect an event based on sensory observations• Location estimation methods such as Kaman filters and particle
filters are used to estimate locations of events • We developed an earthquake reporting system, which is a
novel approach to notify people promptly of an earthquake event
• We plan to expand our system to detect events of various kinds such as rainbows, traffic jam etc.