Leveraging graphical models to improve accuracy and reduce privacy risks of mobile sensing

The proliferation of sensors on mobile phones and wearables has led to a plethora of context classifiers designed to sense the individual's context. We argue that a key missing piece in mobile inference is a layer that fuses the outputs of several classifiers to learn deeper insights into an individual's habitual patterns and associated correlations between contexts, thereby enabling new systems optimizations and opportunities. In this paper, we design CQue, a dynamic bayesian network that operates over classifiers for individual contexts, observes relations across these outputs across time, and identifies opportunities for improving energy-efficiency and accuracy by taking advantage of relations. In addition, such a layer provides insights into privacy leakage that might occur when seemingly innocuous user context revealed to different applications on a phone may be combined to reveal more information than originally intended. In terms of system architecture, our key contribution is a clean separation between the detection layer and the fusion layer, enabling classifiers to solely focus on detecting the context, and leverage temporal smoothing and fusion mechanisms to further boost performance by just connecting to our higher-level inference engine. To applications and users, CQue provides a query interface, allowing a) applications to obtain more accurate context results while remaining agnostic of what classifiers/sensors are used and when, and b) users to specify what contexts they wish to keep private, and only allow information that has low leakage with the private context to be revealed. We implemented CQue in Android, and our results show that CQue can i) improve activity classification accuracy up to 42%, ii) reduce energy consumption in classifying social, location and activity contexts with high accuracy(>90%) by reducing the number of required classifiers by at least 33%, and iii) effectively detect and suppress contexts that reveal private information.