Understanding Large-scale Smartphone Usage

Anna Sapienza is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation of Turin and an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy. Her research is focused on modelling human behaviour in online environments, e.g., online social networks, mobile applications, and games, via high- dimensional digital traces. She collaborates with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark, where she studies smartphone usage and characteristics leading to user engagement. Her research interests stay at the intersection between computational social science, data science, and complex systems.

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of mobile apps on smartphones and tablets. With over 2.7 billion smartphone users across the world checking their phones over 80 times a day, smartphone data offer a unique opportunity to understand main aspects of human behaviours, e.g., mobility, sleep patterns, and mobile app usage. Despite the impact that smartphones have in shaping our society, there is surprisingly little general knowledge about what has changed and what goes on when people stare at their screen. In this talk, I will present the differences in smartphone use across users, based on the study of an unprecedented dataset, including mobile app traces of thousands of users in time. I will show how users interact with smartphones with the aim of characterising users with high/low levels of engagement, the type of apps underlying this engagement, and the effects of external factors, such as user demographics and the environment.