Presentation from Professor Matthew Chalmers from the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow who gave a presentation on beacons at the Intelligent Campus Community Event on the 10th April 2018.

1. Smart Campus: Some Pilots
Prof. Matthew Chalmers
School of Computing Science
University of Glasgow

2. UoG Smart Campus:
Core (Wordy) Themes
Digital environment - develop and evaluate open, flexible, integrated, interoperable
and scalable ICT architecture
Integrated urban energy systems – low carbon, low impact energy generation,
distribution and management
Data-driven infrastructure innovation and resilience enhancement - construction
methods &materials; Building Information Modelling (BIM) for design & life-cycle
performance
Health & wellbeing – understand and improve the physical environment and working
practices for wellbeing & productivity; measure and influence health-related behaviour
Student experience and pedagogy – data-driven services and spaces for an improved
student experience; technology-enabled learning/teaching methods
…and also something else…

3. Two Sides of the Smart Campus
University: using new infrastructure to improve services
Optimising space/energy use, via sensing of & feedback to users
Informing new plans for buildings/infrastructure, and assessing old ones
Guiding educational strategies, and developing new ones
Individual: can I improve my study/job/community…?
Where can my tutorial group meet up, in 10 minutes’ time?
What ‘active travel’ approach would fit with me and what I do?
Is my work/activity taking me towards a good degree, good health…?

4. Smart Campus Pilots
Focus groups & interviews
Created template platform including Bluetooth
beacons
Developed and trialled several apps
Each design aiming to give value to both users
and managers/services

5. Bluetooth Beacons
• Transmit identifiers (~10Hz)
• Phone detects transmissions
• Phone determines when you are in a region
• Range can be set up to about 50m
• Relatively new (few years)

6. Bluetooth Beacons
Transmit identifiers (~10Hz)
Phone detects transmissions
Phone determines when you are in a named region
Range can be set up to about 50m
Relatively new (few years)

7. Beacons instead of WiFi
Privacy
• Passive, opt-in by design, user-controlled
Low cost, easy to deploy, extremely low power for
both phones and beacons

8. Trial 1: Gym
Beacons installed throughout the gym in exercise
areas, reception, lifts, changing rooms
The technology needed to provide value to the
user for them to be willing to adopt and use it
Apps for Android & iOS phones
24 users over one month

9. Entryways
Passive entry /
exit sensing
Occupancy

10. Routes
Routes
Thoroughfares

11. Room Usage
Which spaces
were used
Time spent in
each space
Most gym users
did not do this
before

12. Social
View friend’s
activity
View friend’s
location

13. Motivation:
• “It motivated me to come [to the gym] more”
Increasing variety of gym use (list in app):
• “I just used the app to change my routine, let
me put it that way, like don’t just do fitness
classes, try to do something else”
Improve self-awareness:
• “I could see that maybe I had been a bit
longer or a bit more often than I thought.”

14. Building Management
Gym Manager (Jane Kennedy):
• “The problem we have is they walk in that front door,
we haven’t a clue what they do once they come
in and we haven’t a clue what they do when they
leave. We don’t even know what time they’ve left at.
But you’ll be able to tell us on an average when that
person comes in how long do they stay in the gym.
We’ll be able to work out how long did they spend
getting themselves ready and how long did they
spend doing exercise, and that’s something we’ve
never known.”

15. Aggregate Usage
Building management get a high-level view of how many people
use each part of the gym, and how much time they spend in
each area, and which parts people tend to visit in sequence.
Viewed over time, can be used to adjust heating, lighting,
cleaning etc. to cut costs and improve efficiencies.

16. 11am 12pm 1pm 2pm 4pm 5pm 6pm
4F
Wednesday19thJuly
4F
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3
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Studio 3
“Kettlebells”
Instructor: Joe Bloggs
3pm
Powerplay
40 mins
(avg = 45 mins)

17. Library Staff
17 members of the library staff - 5 later interviewed
• iOS & Android phones, plus iPads
We placed ‘public’ beacons in the reception areas
Participants placed ‘personal’ beacons in places relevant to
their work (most placed 1, max 4)
Library staff were encouraged to share their location by
adding colleagues as friends
Library staff remained in full control of sharing

18. Trial 2: Library
Staff must move between 7 buildings to liaise with
colleagues and to collect and return materials.

19. Working in Distributed Library
“I have more meetings than anyone else [from the archive
team] in the main library building, and it’s 15 a minute
walk there, and it’s a 15 minute walk back”
“Whenever I have a meeting up there, effectively the
university is paying me to walk for half an hour which is
great, part of health and wellbeing”
“I do get to just run into people and have those
serendipitous [conversations]… there’s that project we
haven’t done for ages”

20. Challenges
The team is challenged with delivering improvements in
service with fewer staff, and want to optimise use of
their time.
“My time is ever more pressured – we’re spread much
thinner than ever”
“we have access to more support from the library, but
the physical separation causes issues…”
“So I thought it would be quite interesting to know…
how much of my time… every week is spent in transit”

21. Entryways
Passive entry /
exit sensing
Occupancy
Transit time

22. Offices & Work Spaces
Detect presence in
multiple locations
Support coordination

23. Benefits
Efficient mobile working
“more data about the usage of these buildings might help with the
efficiency – the arguments for efficiency – because it’s not just my time
in going up to the campus, it’s also the students and the researchers
coming down here as well.”
Overcoming address isolation
“There are 3 or 4 of the staff who never go up to the main building… so
they identify this as their workplace and it’s much more difficult for
them to identify with library culture and wider university culture.”
Safer working environment
“I think that’s a really useful security thing as well – because I can be
the only one going down to get something on that floor.”

24. Beacon Coverage
To be cautious about privacy issues, library staff
placed their own beacons in areas important to their
work.
But in the end they wanted more complete coverage
of work spaces than this approach can achieve:
“This doesn’t completely tell me that – because it’s not
recording when I am in meetings … it says when I pass
through somewhere, but it doesn’t say where I am. In
some ways it’s not detailed enough”

25. Trust is Essential
Collecting and sharing location information in the
work place requires a high level of trust within
teams. Information needs to be interpreted within a
culture of mutual respect.
“There’s an uneasiness that comes with being
monitored… are you doing the right things, are
you having the right meetings, are you in the
right locations?”
We found trust evident within teams where there is
a common interpretation of what the work entails.

26. Trial 3: Social Anxiety
Social anxiety can be predicted via patterns of location and
communication, gathered via phone data
• Boukhechba et al., Proc. ACM Ubicomp 2017
An exploration in ethical system design
• 10 participants: initially assessed via SIAS questionnaire
• App deployed on their phones: collects and categorises locations, and
stats of phone calls and SMS. Supports sign up to study by scanning a
QR code.
• Only data sent off phone to our servers are aggregate stats
• Redo analysis of original experiment, but without seeing the personal data

27. Trial 4: Social Anxiety
Simple predictive model: C4.5 decision tree algorithm
Same accuracy of prediction as original experiment
Now looking to scale up to larger experimental cohort

28. Summary
Demonstrated a template platform (hardware & software)
Design rule: individual and institutional value in each app
User in control of sharing their data on use, location…
“When can we have this?”
Preparing new pilot on mental health tracking, with Student
Support and Wellbeing

29. A Parting Word
The ‘something else’ in the Smart Campus is data ethics
Data regulations such as GDPR demand new forms of
system design and institutional process
Analytics of estate use, health, GPA, etc. will degrade
unless ethical systems design is advanced and applied
Large scale EPSRC network on Human Data Interaction,
with health and campus themes, starting in July