10-year impact award for paper on mobile app usage

Awardee Computer Science Professor Antonio Krüger. Photo: Oliver Dietze

Antonio Krüger, professor of computer science at Saarland University and managing director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, received together with Matthias Böhmer (former DFKI, now Prof. FH Köln), Brent Hecht (Northwestern University, Evanston), Johannes Schöning (former DFKI, now Prof. St. Gallen University) and Gernot Bauer (FH Münster) the “Most Influential Paper Award” at the 2021 ACM International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI 2021) for their 2011 paper „Falling asleep with Angry Birds, Facebook and Kindle: a large scale study on mobile application usage“.

The international award recognizes the lasting scientific impact that the researchers from Saarland University and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) have left with their work over the past 10 years.

In their paper, the authors describe a large-scale, deployment-based research study in which they used virtual sensors to collect detailed information on mobile application usage from more than 4,100 users of Android mobile devices. From this, they were able to derive basic descriptive statistics on the duration of usage and contextual descriptive statistics on the time of day and location of application usage. Findings from the study show, among other things, that the average usage time of individual apps back then was already less than one minute and that news apps tended to be used in the morning, while gaming apps were ranked high in the evening, and that messaging apps were most popular overall.

“While applications for mobile devices were already very popular in 2011, there was little public information on mobile app usage patterns until our study. That made our work particularly relevant – to this day, as evidenced by the award we are very happy to receive,” says Antonio Krüger.

The paper, which was already recognized at MobileHCI’s 20th anniversary, has been cited 352 times in the ACM Digital Library and downloaded 6456 times in the last ten years. This represents 16% of all citations for the 2011 conference and 10% of downloads for that year, which also makes it the most influential paper from 10 years ago in terms of citations and downloads.

/pzs /ar

Further Information:

https://mobilehci.acm.org/2021/

https://www.dfki.de/en/web/research/projects-and-publications/publications-overview/publication/5438

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
800 scientists and about 2100 students from more than 80 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Five world-renowned research institutes, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics and the Cluster for “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” as well as Saarland University with three departments and 24 degree programs cover the entire spectrum of computer science.