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A Mobile Phone based reliable interaction tool forintention-based virtual groups of strangers- A case of taxi sharing application
Sangwon Choi, Sangyong Gil
Computer Science Department, KAISTDaejeon, Korea{sangwonchoi7, i.m.cliet}@gmail.com
 Zakaria Alkabbab
Telecommunications Department, INSA LyonLyon, Francezakaria.alkabbab@gmail.com
 
ABSTRACT
Communication is a major concern in the global world weare living, especially in sharing activities among strangerswho speak different languages or have different cultures.
These differences engender trust issues because we can’t
conceive a safe environment where benefits are made by
 people who don’t know each other. Giving the possibility to
users to provide their personal information is one approach
to resolve this issue. But, this solution affects people’s
privacy and safety because of the difficulty to measureloyalty and credibility of individuals.
This area hasn’t been well investigated yet. In fact, the
complexity of human behaviors sets a solid barrier facingresearch works related to collaboration between peoplefrom different communities. Nevertheless, our surveysattest that communication can build trust and confidenceamong strangers after a reasonable amount of time. In thispaper, we present the design and implementation of a novelreliable interaction tool for making real connection amongstrangers within intention based virtual groups to makebenefits by sharing activities.
Author Keywords
Interaction tool, interaction with strangers, location-basedsocial network, privacy, trust, communication
1. INTRODUCTION
The smartphone market has taken off with the introductionof high-tech phones with extensive mobile capabilities,services like Location Based Service (LBS) and SocialNetwork Services (SNS) gained popularity within usersbecause they allow dynamic interactions between userswho, most of the time, know each other or have the sameinterest. Specifically, applications such as Foursquare [5]and WhosHere [12] implement those services. The presentwork expands these applications into a more profitable field(activity sharing) in a view to make savings. For instance, ataxi sharing application allows its users to save money bysharing a ride. This system is different from current SNS
applications because users don’t have to meet again. They
meet only for the purpose of making benefits. However,several problems arise when strangers have to meet
sometimes because they are just shy or they don’t feel safe
and comfortable with peopl
e they don’t know. They
actually want to interact before meeting strangers.
Moreover, they don’t like to share their personal
information so there is a tradeoff between privacy andmaking benefits by sharing activities with strangers. Weconducted numerous surveys that led us to consider theoperation time which consists of making homogenousgroups and efficiently manages the discussion to reach anagreement quickly. This paper introduces the design andimplementation of a taxi sharing application which coversthe issues discussed above and emphasizes the usefulness of an interaction tool to help users feel safe and comfortable tocollaborate. This application is economical in many aspectsbecause it allows its users to save money, it is alsoenvironmentally friendly because users share one car sothey save energy and pollute less. We assume that, byproviding simple interaction method, real connection can bemade without personal information (phone number, sex,
religion…)
 This paper is organized as follows. We discuss relatedworks in Section 2. In Section 3, we introduce the results of the survey we conducted before implementing the taxisharing system. Results of the experiment are then analyzedin Section 4. Followed by a description of the mainfunctions of the application and a graph summarizing itsoverall architecture as well as its implementation in Section5. Then, we conduct a small discussion in Section 6 beforeconcluding the paper in Section 8.
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2. RELATED WORK
Location-based social networks let users see where theirfriends are, search location-tagged content within theirsocial graph, and meet nearby friends [1]. Based on locationinformation, Nan Li and Guanling Chen [1] found fourdifferent types of human moving patterns. Moreover,Foursquare [5] is a representative Location-based socialnetwork application. Similarly, numerous SNS sites mergetheir property with location such as Facebook [4]
 – 
Place ortwitter [11]. Our work is different because thoseapplications are focusing on people who know each other.On the other hand, WhosHere [12] finds chatting candidatesbased on users location information. This is similar tohandling strangers who are located in close area, butchatting does not require real meeting. In addition, thesituation is not dynamic in this case. By reviewing currentLocation-based SNS, we
found that it doesn’t address
connections between strangers, so we can consider ourwork as a contribution to this service.Further, Ride sharing and taxi sharing systems have beendeveloped only on web environment [13] and mobile phoneenvironment [9]. In contrast we these works, we arefocusing more on building a safe environment that willallow strangers to meet and collaborate.
3. SURVEYS
To verify issues on making real group from intention-basedvirtual group, we applied a taxi sharing system. In theonline-taxi-sharing system, users request to share a taxi andfind an online group that has same interest (want to sharetaxi, located at close area, and have same destination). Then,they have to meet in a certain place.To build this system, we have composed 5 interrogationswe want to investigate. Therefore, we conducted two off-line questionnaires to understand user
s’
activity whenmeeting strangers in front of campus cafeteria.The first questionnaire involves Q1 and Q2. It wascompleted by 20 people. All participants are KAISTuniversity students (male: 11, female: 9, average age: 20.9)The second questionnaire includes Q3, Q4, and Q5. Thisquestionnaire was completed by 45 people (male: 27,female: 18, average age: 22.2). Same as the firstquestionnaire; all participants are KAIST students.
Q1: Does it interest you to meet strangers to savemoney or make benefits by sharing an activity withthem?
 
As in social commerce, gathering friends and making agroup to get discounts is common because people do nothave to meet strangers. However, if they have to make avirtual group, wait for other members, then meet face-to-face, and take a taxi with the group members. Thus, our aimis to know whether people are eager to share a taxi or notwith strangers.To answer this question, we asked
“
when you take a taxi,imagine there is somebody with whom you can share taxi.Are you going to share the taxi with him or her?
”
. Theresults show that 90% (18 people) of participants like toshare taxi with strangers. Therefore, we can admit that mostuniversity students want to make groups with strangers if there is an advantage. Though, we cannot be certain thatthis will be generalized to all people because all participantsin this survey are university students. At least, this surveydemonstrates that there are groups who are very motivatedto meet strangers in order to save money. This experiencecan also give them the opportunity to make new friends.Further, half of the participants want to use the taxi-sharingapplication even if only half of battery capacity is left.
Q2: What kind of methods you want to use to make avirtual group who shares the same interest as you bymean of a mobile phone application?
To make real connection from intention-based virtual groupamong strangers, there must be a virtual group at first. Andthere are lots of ways to make a virtual group which has thesame intention or interest when using a mobile phoneapplication. Indeed, the problem is more complicated inmobile devices because people need a simple way to makea group such a touching or pushing a button once.We asked the question
“
when you enter the destination tomake a taxi sharing group, which method is better for you?
”
 At first, we thought people would like automatic grouprecommendation system. But surprisingly, table 1 showsthat manual insertion is preferred than the automatic way.Actually, predicting user
’
s next location is not a simple task.Moreover, GPS data is not that accurate to find a specificarea. So, we decided to develop a manually well-definedgraphical interface so that people can use our system just bytouching once.
Q3: How far would you go to make a real group?
For a taxi sharing system, there is a distance limitation thatwe use to make groups because group members shouldmeet in a nearby place. At the same time, people might beready to wait a longer time or walk a longer distance tomeet the other members of the same group if there is morebenefit. So we asked two questions;
“
Imagine you are goingto take a taxi from KAIST to Dunsan (costs about 5,000
Numberof users
Manually insert the location using map or text 5Use from previous destination database 9Automatically finds the users 6
Table 1: User preference method of making virtual group
 
KRW). If there are other people with whom you can sharethe taxi, how far would you walk to meet them?
”
, and
“
Imagine you are going to take a taxi from KAIST toDaejeon station (costs about 10,000 KRW). If there areother people with whom you can share the taxi, how farwould you walk to meet them?
”
 The only difference is how much the user can save money.If two people share a taxi, they can just save 2,500 ~ 5000KRWs. Although, table 2 shows that most people arewilling to go to a place five minutes away, this cannot be anabsolute threshold. However, we can infer that people canmove to another place to meet strangers.
Q4: How to decide the place where you have to meet?
 
After virtual group is made, people decide the place wherethey will meet. Table 3 shows the preference of determiningmeeting place. Meeting place can be determined by thesystem itself or by negotiation. More than half participantslike that the system suggest a meeting place and the rest of them prefer text messaging (SMS and messenger) to voicemessage when negotiation is required. That could beexplained by the fact that people are reluctant to interactwith strangers. At the same time, the other members mustbe trustworthy so any kind of interaction will be inevitableto improve the credibility of the system.
Q5: How much personal information would you like toshare?
Through five questions we got the following result; beforemeeting strangers, people want to communicate and interactwith them within a virtual group by talking or text-messaging. Moreover,
they don’t like the idea of 
sharingtheir personal information because
it’s private
. Thereforethere is a trade-off between privacy and trust. The morethey interact, the better they trust.
INTERACTION TOOL
According to our surveys, we observe that 1) taxi sharingrequires making real groups, but it does not require a lot of intimacy among group members because they do not haveto meet again. 2) There must be a minimal credibility tobecome a group member.Based on this observation, we propose an interaction toolthat users can communicate and interact to reach anagreement. When a virtual group is composed, users cansee where the other members are. Then, members canchoose place where they want to meet. Those responses willbe notified to other members and users can feel safe whenthey are interacting with each other. Even with this minimalinteraction, we assume that it will be enough to share a taxitogether. Also, position information can be delivered morecorrectly by our interaction tool than by voice call or textmessage.
Figure 1: interaction tool layout for taxi sharing system,location that users want to meet is represented to all groupmembers when a user touches (chooses) a location
4. EXPERIMENT
To verify that our interaction tool works as we expected, weset the experiment with 3 conditions in table 4.
Problem statement
In the case of making real-connection from the intention-based virtual group among strangers in by mean of a mobilephone application, we evaluate the trade-
off between users’
privacy and trust through our survey results. Likewise, wementioned that people
don’t want to
share their context
Duration 5,000 KRW 10,000 KRW
Less than 1 min 7 12Less than 3 min 8 10Less than 5 min 16 16Less than 10 min 8 3Less than 20 min 6 4
Table 2: Number of people who will use the taxi sharingsystem according to the amount of money saving/distanceof the ride
How to decide the place tomeet?# of people
Public place like taxi stop bysystem12Mid-place among users bysystem15Negotiation between users 18If you aregoing tonegotiate,which methodis better?Phone 7Skype 8SMS 16Messenger 8
Table 3: Preference of determining meeting place
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