The Ten Year Impact Award at the 21st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2022) from November 27–30, 2022, went to Florian Michahelles, Coordinator of the CAIML Special Interest Group for Human-Centered AI, Professor for Ubiquitous Computing at the Research Unit for Artifact-based Computing and User Research of TU Wien, and his colleagues from the University of St. Gallen and ETH Zürich.

Their paper on Driving behavior analysis with smartphones: insights from a controlled field study withstood the test of time – and was honored by the MUM 2022 committee for its influential findings.

Abstract

We evaluate a mobile application that assesses driving behavior based on in-vehicle acceleration measurements and gives corresponding feedback to drivers. In the insurance business, such applications have recently gained traction as a viable alternative to the monitoring of drivers via “black boxes” installed in vehicles, which lacks interaction opportunities and is perceived as privacy intrusive by policyholders. However, pose uncertainty and other noise-inducing factors make smartphones potentially less reliable as sensor platforms. We therefore compare critical driving events generated by a smartphone with reference measurements from a vehicle-fixed IMU in a controlled field study. The study was designed to capture driver variability under real-world conditions, while minimizing the influence of external factors. We find that the mobile measurements tend to overestimate critical driving events, possibly due to deviation from the calibrated initial device pose. While weather and daytime do not appear to influence event counts, road type is a significant factor that is not considered in most current state-of-the-art implementations.

About Florian Michahelles

Florian Michahelles has joined TU Wien Informatics as a full professor in 2020. Previously, he was head of research group at Siemens Corporation in Berkeley/CA, associate director of the Auto-ID Labs at ETH Zurich, a visiting researcher at Keio University, and MIT Sloan visiting fellow. He holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and an MSc from the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich in Computer Science. Florian Michahelles has a strong foothold in entrepreneurship and the management of innovation. Already as a student, he was engaged at CDTM, he further participated in MIT’s E-Lab, is co-founder of 42matters, co-organizer of intrapreneurship events at Siemens, and has several years of experience in mentoring startups in the Bay Area.

Michahelles is interested in applying technology to support humans in their tasks and activities while keeping the human user in control. How can we wrap computing capabilities into proactive services, how can we leverage AI to free users from routine and mundane tasks and let them focus on what we humans usually are best at – creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and social collaboration? To Florian Michahelles, the answer is clear: By developing new artifacts and prototypes in order to experience and evaluate novel concepts of human-machine collaboration. And by inviting students, research collaborators, and partners from the industry to join us in this endeavor.