Instilling Social to Physical: Co-Regularized Heterogeneous Transfer Learning

Ubiquitous computing tasks, such as human activity recognition (HAR), are enabling a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from healthcare to environment monitoring. The success of a ubiquitous computing task relies on sufficient physical sensor data with groundtruth labels, which are always scarce due to the expensive annotating process. Meanwhile, social media platforms provide a lot of social or semantic context information. People share what they are doing and where they are frequently in the messages they post. This rich set of socially shared activities motivates us to transfer knowledge from social media to address the sparsity issue of labelled physical sensor data. In order to transfer the knowledge of social and semantic context, we propose a Co-Regularized Heterogeneous Transfer Learning (CoHTL) model, which builds a common semantic space derived from two heterogeneous domains. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two ubiquitous computing tasks, namely human activity recognition and region function discovery.