Towards a citizen actuation framework for smart environments

Abstract

Citizen Actuation is a new concept that aims to retain humans in the loop throughout a system's lifecycle. In system design, humans are (generally) just users of a system but both Citizen Sensing and Citizen Actuation rely on users being included in a Cyber Physical Social System. In this paper, we investigate employing profile features from social networks as a method for user selection. These users will then be sent small tasks to complete that might normally be undertaken by actuators. To achieve this, we conducted a survey where users evaluated profiles on a limited number of features and posts. Separately, we collected profile data from the same set of profiles and computed calculated values such as Reply Ratio to compare them with the survey findings. This study has revealed interesting insights in to what the survey participants find important in relation to social media profiles and completing tasks. These include insights such as how they view the number of tweets, the profile description text, and how a user interacts with other users as being important when forming an opinion on a profile.