As computing services play an ever bigger role in our lives, the design of compelling applications require deeper insight into people’s thinking, behaviour and motivation.  It would be ideal if we can do this with minimum interference using mobile and wearable devices that people carry all the time.  Fortunately, technological advancement is opening up an unprecedented opportunity to make this a reality.

In particular, understanding people-to-people conversations is essential, as people spend a significant amount of their time on social activities. However, capturing such people-to-people conversations is a challenging problem due to subtlety and unpredictability in conversations.  In a sense, it could be more difficult compared to people-to-machine conversations such as Siri or Google voices as the latter just needs to understand the meaning of what users say and obey the instructions given.

Assistant Professor Lee Youngki of the SMU School of Information Systems is a pioneer in mobile sensing and context monitoring.  He has used mobile and sensor technology to capture and monitor human behaviour accurately, enabling useful mobile applications that were not available to us before.  In this podcast, Asst Prof Lee shares his research and applications.