How it Works
1. Sign up
Sign up for ConfLab by filling in our Informed Consent Form where you agree to take part and to donating your data for research purposes. Still not sure? Read our FAQ
2. Meet the Chairs on Thursday
Our data collection will take place on Thursday from 16:30 to 17:30 at the Rhodes hall. After you arrive, we will check if you agreed to your data for research. You fill in a short survey about your research interests and experience with MM. We will give you our newly designed MINGLE Midge to be worn around your neck. After that you are free to meet peers and the conference's organizational chairs at this event.
3. Tutorial and Debrief on Friday
Join us in learning more about the science and technology behind ConfLab including discussions on privacy, ethics, & data sharing.
4. Research and the Future
Your data will help progress research on social interaction analysis in the wild. It will be shared in a pseudonymised form with the research community under an End User License Agreement to be only used for non-commercial and non-governmental research. We also hope to use it for setting future grand challenges.
What data are you contributing?
We will be collecting the following data as part of this event
Acceleration and proximity
Our newly designed MINGLE Midge wearable device records acceleration and proximity during your interactions. Acceleration readings can be used to infer some of your actions like walking and gesturing. It is worn around the neck like a conference badge.
Video
Overhead cameras will mounted to capture the interaction. These videos will be used to annotate behavior and for detection of social actions like speaking or of conversational groups.
Low-frequency audio
The Mingle MIDGE will also record low-frequency audio. This low frequency is enough for recognizing if you are speaking, but not enough to understand the content of your speech, giving us valuable information without compromising your privacy. Example audio:
Survey measures
Your research interests and level of experience within the MM community will be linked to the data above via a numerical identifier.
Data subject FAQ
Does my gender and age get linked to my data?
No. Only your research interests and level of experience with the MM community.
Who will the data be shared with?
The data you donate will be shared in a pseudo-anomized form. This means that your data is linked to a numerical identifier that cannot be traced back to your identity. The data is shared under an end user license agreement (EULA) where users sign and agree to a number of restrictions on how the data is to be used and shared.
What's in it for me?
Within a month after the end of the event, you will receive information about your behavior based on your sensor data for comparison in a pseudonymised form relative to other participants. This can be an interesting new way for you to reflect about your networking behavior. You get to reflect on the ethics of data sharing by living through the process, which could be useful for reflecting on your own research.
What information do I get back about my sensor data?
From the proximity sensor we will estimate how many people you interacted with compared to the distribution from all other participants.
I work at a company. Can I take part?
Yes! However, our ethics board do not allow us to share data for commercial or governmental research. The EULA only allows for academic research to be carried out with the data.
Hayley Hung
Associate Professor: Socially Perceptive Computing Lab
Ekin Gedik
Postdoctoral researcher: Multi-modal Social Experience Modelling
Stephanie Tan
PhD Student: Multi-modal Head Pose Estimation & Conversation Detection
Chirag Raman
PhD Student: Multi-modal Group Evolution Modelling
Jose Vargas
PhD Student: Multi-modal Conversational Event Detection
Organizers
ConfLab is an initiative of the Socially Perceptive Computing Lab, Delft University of Technology. We have over 10 years of experience in developing automated behavior analysis tools and collecting large scale social behavior in the wild. We are partially supported by the Dutch Research Agency (NWO) MINGLE project and the organization of ACM Multimedia 2019.