On October 18th, 2022 at 3.30 pm Anna Sapienza, Postdoctoral Researcher at Copenhagen University Center, will give a seminar on "Understanding Human Behavior and Engagement in Smartphone Usage" in DEIB Seminar Room.

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of mobile apps on smartphones and tablets. With over 2.7 billion smartphone users across the world checking their phones over 80 times a day, smartphone data offer a unique opportunity to understand main aspects of human behaviours, e.g., mobility, sleep patterns, and mobile app usage. Despite the impact that smartphones have in shaping our society, there is surprisingly little general knowledge about what has changed and what goes on when people stare at their screen. In this talk,
I will present the preliminary findings on the differences in smartphone use across users, based on the study of an unprecedented dataset, including mobile app traces of thousands of users in time. I will show how users interact with smartphones with the aim of characterising highly engaged users, the type of apps that drive this engagement, and how usage patterns differ when considering external factors, such as user demographics and the environment.

Anna Sapienza is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Copenhagen Center of Social Data Science (SODAS), University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy. Her research is focused on modelling human behaviour in online environments, e.g., online social networks, mobile applications, and games, via high-dimensional digital traces. She collaborates with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark, where she studies smartphone usage and characteristics leading to user engagement. Her research interests stay at the intersection between computational social science, data science, and complex systems.