Facing Up Social Activity Recognition Using Smartphone Sensors

In the last years context awareness has become a reality in real-world applications. However, building comprehensive context recognition systems which are able to recognize both low and high-level context information remains a challenge. In this paper, we discuss environment recognition as a means to address the issue of recognizing a high-level user context, social activity. In many countries, bars, pubs and similar establishments are one of the main places where social engagement takes place, and thus we propose recognizing these types of environments using data collected from mobile device sensors as a proxy for inferring social activity. For this purpose, we discuss the common defining characteristics of these establishments and the sensors we will use to recognize them. After that, we introduce the design of our system. Finally, we present the preliminary evaluation carried out to assess the validity of our proposal.