Calling patterns in human communication dynamics Jiang, Zhi-Qiang; Xie, Wen-Jie; Li, Ming-Xia ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2013, Volume:
110, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Modern technologies not only provide a variety of communication modes (e.g., texting, cell phone conversation, and online instant messaging), but also detailed electronic traces of these ...communications between individuals. These electronic traces indicate that the interactions occur in temporal bursts. Here, we study intercall duration of communications of the 100,000 most active cell phone users of a Chinese mobile phone operator. We confirm that the intercall durations follow a power-law distribution with an exponential cutoff at the population level but find differences when focusing on individual users. We apply statistical tests at the individual level and find that the intercall durations follow a power-law distribution for only 3,460 individuals (3.46%). The intercall durations for the majority (73.34%) follow a Weibull distribution. We quantify individual users using three measures: out-degree, percentage of outgoing calls, and communication diversity. We find that the cell phone users with a power-law duration distribution fall into three anomalous clusters: robot-based callers, telecom fraud, and telephone sales. This information is of interest to both academics and practitioners, mobile telecom operators in particular. In contrast, the individual users with a Weibull duration distribution form the fourth cluster of ordinary cell phone users. We also discover more information about the calling patterns of these four clusters (e.g., the probability that a user will call the c ᵣ-th most contact and the probability distribution of burst sizes). Our findings may enable a more detailed analysis of the huge body of data contained in the logs of massive users.
This paper explains the importance (1) of full user-space identification with categorization in requirements engineering (RE) and of ensuring that the categorization is a partition of the user space, ...(2) of the creation and application of user-space-covering personas in RE, (3) of the use of grounded analysis to do RE to produce a specification as a grounded theory, and (4) of privacy and security features in computer-based systems. Then it gives the steps of a grounded analysis method for doing user-space identification with categorization and producing personas as a grounded theory that is describing the classes of users for a computer-based system. The paper summarizes a case study of an iterative application of this method to arrive at a set of user-space-covering personas for privacy and security features in computer-based systems, and it shows how these personas can be used to inform RE for these features. The full case study and the descriptions of the personas are found in the appendices.
•We summarize the importance of the creation and application of personas in requirements engineering (RE).•We summarize the importance of user-space identification with categorization in RE.•We summarize the importance of privacy and security (PAS) in computer-based systems.•We give the steps of a grounded analysis (GA) method for doing RE.•We give a case study of using the GA method to do RE for PAS tools.
Long term evolution (LTE) is a user-friendly network in providing a user requested service, and the growth of LTE is reported exponentially due to the attractive applications. The existence of the ...huge number of users and a massive presence of user demands in the network raise a question on the Quality-of-Service (QoS). In order to assure the required QoS with the available resources in the network, the paper proposes a call admission control scheme using a fuzzy-based decisive approach. The proposed method works based on the available resources in the network and allocates extra resource blocks when there is a lag in the demanded QoS. The flexible and user-friendly service is assured to three groups of users, for which the users are categorized based on the requested service as soon the service is requested. The simulation environment is developed to perform the fuzzy-based call admission control in LTE such that the results prove that the proposed method outperformed the existing methods in terms of delay, throughput, cell power, and call drops. The delay, throughput, cell power, and call drops using the proposed method are 0.1103 s, 1,294,932 bps, 44.2071 dBm, and 328, respectively. Also, the proposed method has the minimum call blocking probability of 0.0527 and 0.2901 for handoff users and new users. It has the call dropping probability of 0.0528 and 0.3357 for handoff users and new users, respectively.
Online social network analysis has attracted great attention with a vast number of users sharing information and availability of APIs that help to crawl online social network data. In this paper, we ...study the research studies that are helpful for user characterization as online users may not always reveal their true identity or attributes. We especially focused on user attribute determination such as gender and age; user behavior analysis such as motives for deception; mental models that are indicators of user behavior; user categorization such as bots versus humans; and entity matching on different social networks. We believe our summary of analysis of user characterization will provide important insights into researchers and better services to online users.
In this paper, we introduce the user’s privileges and traffic maximum delay tolerance as additional dimensions in the call admission control processes to efficiently control the utilization of LTE-A ...network resources. Based on this idea, we propose an efficient call admission control scheme named “delay aware and user categorizing-based CAC with adaptive resource reservation (DA–UC-ARR)”, where the user priority is adjusted dynamically based on the current network conditions and the users’ categorizations and traffic delay tolerances, to increase the network’s resource utilization and at the same time to maximize the operators’ revenue. In this proposed scheme, the users are classified into Golden users and Silver users, and the type of service per user is classified as real time (RT) and non-real time (NRT) services. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the corresponding results of previous schemes, referred to as the adaptive resource reservation-based call admission control (ARR-CAC) (Andrews et al., 2010; AlQahtani, 2014), where user categorization and delay were not taken into consideration in the call admission control process. Simulation results indicate the superiority of the proposed scheme because it is able to achieve a better balance between system utilization, users’ privileges provided by network operators and QoS provisioning compared to the ARR-CAC scheme.
In this paper, we introduce the user’s privileges and traffic maximum delay tolerance as additional dimensions in the call admission control processes to efficiently control the utilization of LTE-A ...network resources. Based on this idea, we propose an efficient call admission control scheme named “Delay Aware and User Categorizing-based CAC with Adaptive Resource Reservation”, where the user priority is adjusted dynamically based on the current network conditions and the users’ categorizations and traffic delay tolerances, to increase the network’s resource utilization and at the same time to maximize the operators’ revenue. In this proposed scheme, the users are classified into Golden users and Silver users, and the type of service per user is classified as real-time (RT) and non-real-time (NRT) services. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the corresponding results of previous schemes, referred to as the adaptive resource reservation-based Call Admission Control (ARR-CAC), where user categorization and delay were not taken into consideration in the call admission control process. Simulation results indicate the superiority of the proposed scheme because it is able to achieve a better balance between system utilization, users’ privileges provided by network operators and QoS provisioning compared to the ARR-CAC scheme.
The influence of aging on computer interaction has been widely analyzed in human–computer interaction research literature. Despite this, there are no age-based user maps that could support the ...user-interface customization. Studying the specific needs and constraints of these groups is crucial in order to adapt a user interface to the user’s interaction requirements. This work studies the performance of a sample of participants on three different basic tasks (pointing, dragging and dropping, and text selection) and the influence of age for each of them. It is concluded that this influence differs between specific activities. A group profile map that can support automatic classification in the future has been obtained.
This paper contributes to the reworking of the traditional concepts and methods of Science and Technology Studies that is necessary in order to analyse the development and use of social media and ...other emerging information infrastructures (IIs). Through long-term studies of the development of two contrasting IIs, the paper examines the prosumer-management strategies by which vendors manage their relationships with their diverse users. Despite the sharp differences between our cases - an online-game with social network features and traditional enterprise systems - we find striking homologies in the ways vendors manage the tensions underpinning the design and development of mass-market products. Thus their knowledge infrastructures - the set of tools and instruments through which vendors maintain an adequate understanding of their multiple users - change in the face of competing exigencies. Market expansion may favour 'efficient' quantitative user assessment methods and the construction of abstract user categories for designing new generic solutions and services around market segments. However where a product extends into new and unfamiliar user markets the growing social distance between developer and user may call for 'richer' direct ways of knowing the user. We note the emergence of collective fora, which can provide a space for independent action and innovation by users. However, these were managed communities. Certain user relations functions were pushed out to the community or third-party organizations and at other times pulled back in-house - for example, to increase vendor direct control. This picture is far removed from the visions of seamless integration of producers and users encouraged by notions such as prosumer.
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