Groo-Me: Handling the dynamics of our sociality on mobile phone

Mobile phones are playing an ever growing role in the today´s technology-assisted society as they support, maintain, ease and even influence our real life´s social behavior and interactions. The analysis and understanding of human behavior and sociality on mobile phones have become an emerging field of research and a few works have recently offered empirical evidence of their nature by analyzing the phone call and/or text message communication patterns of large datasets. Although these studies have drawn attention to a few aspects that influence and characterize human interactions by mobile phones, none of these results are mirrored into any on-board feature of modern smartphones. This paper describes a new application, named Groo-Me to recall the notion of Dunbar´s grooming coalition, whose principal aim is to fill the gap. We motivate the app functionalities on the base of an extensive analysis of a large anonymized dataset of Call Detail Records (CDR) containing call and text message activities of almost 1m mobile subscribers of a large mobile operator. The application is available for Android-based smartphones and maintains the user´s personal network, helps users to control their core sociality, exploits burstiness and periodicity to predict the next user´s activity by dynamically updating the list of favorite within a given time window, collects statistics about the user´s interactions on different channels.