Social Interaction using Human Mobility Prediction

Leveraging the regularities of people’s trajectories, mobility prediction can help forecast social interaction opportunities. In this project, in order to facilitate real-world social interaction, we aim to predict “serendipitous” social interactions, which are defined as unplanned encounters and interaction opportunities and regarded as emerging social interactions. We collected GPS trajectory data from people’ daily life on campus and use it as empirical mobility traces to generate decision trees and model trees to predict next venues, arrival times, and user encounter. Mobility regularities are mainly considered in these prediction models, and mobility contexts (e.g., time, location, and speed) act as decision nodes in the classification trees. Two prototype applications were developed to support serendipitous social interaction on campus, and the feedback from a user study with 25 users demonstrated the usability of these two applications.

This work appears in IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems.