BASE - Behavioral Analytics for Smart Environments

Understanding human behavior through behavioral analytics is widely recognized as being key to providing new services and solutions in many application domains. The key to behavioral analytics is to be able to identify and track individual user interactions across time and space. Within the purely digital domain of the Web, ``behavioral analytics'' are enabled through the use of cookies that provide the mechanism for tracking individual user interactions within and across sessions. However, while there are numerous application-specific initiatives to measure elements of human behavior, no general analytics frameworks exist for emerging pervasive environments that mix physical and digital interactions -- we simply do not have viable mechanisms for service providers to track user interactions in the real world without raising significant privacy concerns. BASE provides an initial exploration of the problem domain via behavior modeling and model solicitation. It will combine both theoretical and practical insights in order to understand the capabilities and limits of generating human mobility and activity models collaboratively (i.e., in a distributed, non-centralized fashion) that can be used to underpin future analytics systems. It will also assess how such mobility models can then be used to provide behavioral analytics for pervasive environments.