Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems

Computing Networking and Services

18th EAI International Conference
MobiQuitous 2021 Virtual Event
November 8 11 2021 Proceedings
Takahiro Hara
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Lecture Notes of the Institute
for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics
and Telecommunications Engineering 419

Editorial Board Members

Ozgur Akan
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Paolo Bellavista
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Jiannong Cao
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Geoffrey Coulson
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Falko Dressler
University of Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany
Domenico Ferrari
Università Cattolica Piacenza, Piacenza, Italy
Mario Gerla
UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
Hisashi Kobayashi
Princeton University, Princeton, USA
Sergio Palazzo
University of Catania, Catania, Italy
Sartaj Sahni
University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
Xuemin (Sherman) Shen
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Mircea Stan
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Xiaohua Jia
City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Albert Y. Zomaya
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/8197
Takahiro Hara Hirozumi Yamaguchi (Eds.)
•

Mobile and Ubiquitous

Systems: Computing,
Networking and Services
18th EAI International Conference, MobiQuitous 2021
Virtual Event, November 8–11, 2021
Proceedings

123
Editors
Takahiro Hara Hirozumi Yamaguchi
Osaka University Osaka University
Osaka, Japan Osaka, Japan

ISSN 1867-8211 ISSN 1867-822X (electronic)

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics
and Telecommunications Engineering
ISBN 978-3-030-94821-4 ISBN 978-3-030-94822-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94822-1

© ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2022
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 Preface

We are delighted to introduce the proceedings of the eighteenth edition of the European
Alliance for Innovation (EAI) International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous
Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous 2021). Despite the
considerable research effort in the area of mobile and ubiquitous computing over nearly
two decades, and the maturity of some of its base technologies, many challenges
persist. The goal of this conference series is to provide a forum for presenting and
discussing high-quality research in the field, involving international practitioners and
researchers from diverse backgrounds. Areas addressed by MobiQuitous include sys-
tems, applications, social networks, middleware, networking, sensing, data manage-
ment, data processing, and services, all with special focus on mobile and ubiquitous
computing.
The technical program of Mobiquitous 2021 consisted of 26 full papers, selected
from 79 submitted papers, in oral presentation sessions at the main conference track.
The acceptance rate was 33%. Aside from the high-quality technical paper presenta-
tions, the technical program also featured two keynote speeches, one industrial session,
one poster and demo session, and four technical workshops. The two keynote speeches
were given by Chieko Asakawa (IBM Fellow/Chief Executive Director of the National
Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan, Japan) and Claudio Bettini
(University of Milan, Italy). The industrial session included two invited speeches by
Chihiro Ono (KDDI Research, Inc., Japan) and Kota Tsubouchi (Yahoo! Japan Cor-
poration, Japan). The poster and demo session consisted of 11 presentations.
The four workshops organized were the First Workshop on Ubiquitous and
Multi-domain User Modeling (UMUM 2021), the First International Workshop on
Smart Society Technologies (IWSST 2021), the Fourth International Workshop on
Mobile Ubiquitous Systems, Infrastructures, Communications and AppLications
(MUSICAL 2021 Fall) and the Workshop on Innovative Technologies for the
Healthcare Empowerment (InnovTech4Health). The UMUM 2021 workshop aimed to
address how to build ubiquitous and multi-domain user models and increase their
applicability in real-world contexts. The IWSST 2021 workshop aimed to discuss
technologies and applications that solve relevant problems in modern society.
The MUSICAL 2021 Fall workshop aimed to discuss technologies related to future
mobile ubiquitous systems. The InnovTech4Health workshop focused on the devel-
opment of information and communication technologies for wellbeing.
Coordination with the steering chair, Imrich Chlamtac, was essential for the success
of the conference. We sincerely appreciate his constant support and guidance. It was
also a great pleasure to work with such an excellent organizing committee team for
their hard work in organizing and supporting the conference. In particular, we are
grateful to the Technical Program Committee who completed the peer-review process
for technical papers and helped to put together a high-quality technical program. We
are also grateful to the conference manager, Karolina Marcinova, for her support and
vi Preface

all the authors who submitted their papers to the MobiQuitous 2021 conference and
workshops.
We strongly believe that MobiQuitous provides a good forum for all researchers,
developers, and practitioners to discuss current and future research directions of mobile
and ubiquitous computing. We also expect that the future MobiQuitous conferences
will be as successful and stimulating as this year’s, as indicated by the contributions
presented in this volume.

November 2021 Takahiro Hara

Hirozumi Yamaguchi
Takuya Maekawa
Stephan Sigg
Vaskar Raychoudhury
 Conference Organization

Steering Committee
Imrich Chlamtac University of Trento, Italy

Organizing Committee

General Chairs
Takahiro Hara Osaka University, Japan
Hirozumi Yamaguchi Osaka University, Japan

Technical Program Committee Chairs

Takuya Maekawa Osaka University, Japan
Stephan Sigg Aalto University, Finland
Vaskar Raychoudhury Miami University, USA

Local Chairs
Shigemi Ishida Kyushu University, Japan
Tetsuya Shigeyasu Prefectural University of Hiroshima, Japan

Sponsorship and Exhibits Chair

Susumu Ishihara Shizuoka University, Japan

Workshops Chairs
Takuya Yoshihiro Wakayama University, Japan
Janick Edinger University of Mannheim, Germany
Md Osman Gani Miami University, USA

Publicity and Social Media Chairs

Keiichi Yasumoto NAIST, Japan
Stephan Haller Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
viii Conference Organization

Publications Chair
Akira Uchiyama Osaka University, Japan

Web Chair
Hiroki Yoshikawa Osaka University, Japan

Posters and Demos Chairs

Yutaka Arakawa Kyushu University, Japan
JeongGil Ko Yonsei University, Japan

Industry Track Chair

Atsushi Tagami KDDI Research, Japan

Financial Chair
Akimitsu Kanzaki Shimane University, Japan

Award Committee Chair

Hiroshi Shigeno Keio University, Japan

Student Volunteer Chair

Teruhiro Mizumoto Osaka University, Japan

Technical Program Committee

Michele Albano Aalborg University, Finland
Kenichi Arai Nagasaki University, Japan
Yutaka Arakawa Kyushu University, Japan
Christian Becker University of Mannheim, Germany
Michael Beigl Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Paolo Bellavista University of Bologna, Germany
Saadi Boudjit Paris University 13, France
Beenish Chaudhry University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA
Jingyuan Cheng University of Science and Technology of China, China
Gabriele Civitarese University of Milan, Italy
Luca Davoli University of Parma, Italy
Pari Delir Haghighi Monash University, Australia
Shi Dianxi National University of Defense Technology, China
Andrzej Duda Grenoble Institute of Technology, France
Yu Enokibori Nagoya University, Japan
 Conference Organization ix

Viktor Erdelyi Osaka University, Japan

Paulo Ferreira University of Oslo, Norway
Stefan Fischer University of Lübeck, Germany
Kary Främling Aalto University, Finland
Chris Gniady University of Arizona, USA
Bin Guo Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Alireza Hassani Deakin University, Australia
Peizhao Hu Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Sozo Inoue Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
Shigemi Ishida Future University Hakodate, Japan
Susumu Ishihara Shizuoka University, Japan
Naoya Isoyama Kobe University, Japan
Beihong Jin Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
China
Akimitsu Kanzaki Shimane University, Japan
Nobuo Kawaguchi Nagoya University, Japan
Fahim Khan University of Tokyo, Japan
Yasue Kishino NTT, Japan
Yoji Kiyota LIFULL Co., Ltd., Japan
Quan Kong Hitachi, Ltd., Japan
Matthias Kranz University of Passau, Germany
Satoshi Kurihara Keio University, Japan
Brent Lagesse University of Washington Bothell, USA
Philippe Lalanda Joseph Fourier University, France
Spyros Lalis University of Thessaly, Greece
Guohao Lan Duke University, USA
Dongman Lee KAIST, South Korea
Uichin Lee KAIST, South Korea
Seng Loke Deakin University, Australia
Takuya Maekawa Osaka University, Japan
A. K. M. Jahangir University of South Carolina Upstate, USA
Majumder
Gustavo Marfia University of Bologna, Italy
Chulhong Min Nokia Bell Labs, USA
Sajib Mistry Curtin University, Perth, Australia
Teruhiro Mizumoto Osaka University, Japan
Kazuya Murao Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Kazuya Ohara NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan
Ren Ohmura Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan
Tadashi Okoshi Keio University, Japan
Santi Phithakkitnukoon Chiang Mai University, Thailand
Vaskar Raychoudhury Miami University, USA
Hamada Rizk Osaka University, Japan/Tanta University, Egypt
Kay Roemer TU Graz, Austria
George Roussos Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Navrati Saxena San Jose State University, USA
x Conference Organization

Bastian Schäfermeier University of Kassel, Germany

Sougata Sen BITS Pilani, Goa, India
Arash Shaghaghi UNSW Sydney, Australia
Hiroshi Shigeno Keio University, Japan
Tetsuya Shigeyasu Prefectural University of Hiroshima, Japan
Atsushi Shimada Kyushu University, Japan
Stephan Sigg Aalto University, Finland
Witawas Srisa-an University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Yasuyuki Sumi Future University Hakodate, Japan
Chiu Tan Temple University, Japan
Akihito Taya Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan
Tsutomu Terada Kobe University, Japan
Akira Uchiyama Osaka University, Japan
Hiroki Watanabe Hokkaido University, Japan
Lars Wolf TU Braunschweig, Germany
Weitao Xu City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Keiichi Yasumoto Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Hiroyuki Yomo Kansai University, Japan
Kristina Yordanova University of Rostock, Germany
Takuya Yoshihiro Wakayama University, Japan
Yanmin Zhu Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
 Contents

MobiQuitous 2021

Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human

Mobility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Naoto Takeda, Daisuke Kamisaka, Roberto Legaspi, Yutaro Mishima,
and Atsunori Minamikawa

Design of Room-Layout Estimator Using Smart Speaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Tomoki Joya, Shigemi Ishida, Yudai Mitsukude, and Yutaka Arakawa

Dynamic Taxi Ride-Sharing Through Adaptive Request Propagation

Using Regional Taxi Demand and Supply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Haoxiang Yu, Vaskar Raychoudhury, and Snehanshu Saha

Exploring the Challenges of Using Food Journaling Apps: A Case-study

with Young Adults . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Tejal Lalitkumar Karnavat, Jaskaran Singh Bhatia, Surjya Ghosh,
and Sougata Sen

Fine-Grained Respiration Monitoring During Overnight Sleep Using

IR-UWB Radar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Siheng Li, Zhi Wang, Fusang Zhang, and Beihong Jin

Teledrive: A Multi-master Hybrid Mobile Telerobotics System with

Federated Avatar Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Ashis Sau, Abhijan Bhattacharyya, and Madhurima Ganguly

Is This IoT Device Likely to Be Secure? Risk Score Prediction for IoT
Devices Using Gradient Boosting Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Carlos A. Rivera A., Arash Shaghaghi, David D. Nguyen,
and Salil S. Kanhere

Optimizing Unlicensed Coexistence Network Performance Through

Data Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Srikant Manas Kala, Vanlin Sathya, Kunal Dahiya, Teruo Higashino,
and Hirozumi Yamaguchi

One-Shot Wayfinding Method for Blind People via OCR and Arrow
Analysis with a 360-Degree Smartphone Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Yutaro Yamanaka, Seita Kayukawa, Hironobu Takagi, Yuichi Nagaoka,
Yoshimune Hiratsuka, and Satoshi Kurihara
xii Contents

WiFi-Based Multi-task Sensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Xie Zhang, Chengpei Tang, Yasong An, and Kang Yin

A User-Centric Privacy-Preserving Approach to Control Data Collection,

Storage, and Disclosure in Own Smart Home Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Chathurangi Ishara Wickramasinghe and Delphine Reinhardt

Q-Learning-Based Spatial Reuse Method Considering Throughput Fairness

by Negative Reward for High Throughput . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Mirai Takematsu, Shota Sakai, Masashi Kunibe, and Hiroshi Shigeno

System Architecture for Autonomous Drone-Based Remote Sensing . . . . . . . 220

Manos Koutsoubelias, Nasos Grigoropoulos, Giorgos Polychronis,
Giannis Badakis, and Spyros Lalis

Adaptive Replica Selection in Mobile Edge Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

João Dias, João A. Silva, and Hervé Paulino

Generalizing Wireless Ad Hoc Routing for Future Edge Applications . . . . . . 264

André Rosa, Pedro Ákos Costa, and João Leitão

Longitudinal Compliance Analysis of Android Applications with Privacy

Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
Saad Sajid Hashmi, Nazar Waheed, Gioacchino Tangari,
Muhammad Ikram, and Stephen Smith

Design Validation of a Workplace Stress Management Mobile App for

Healthcare Workers During COVID-19 and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
Beenish Moalla Chaudhry and Ashraful Islam

SEMEO: A Semantic Equivalence Analysis Framework for Obfuscated

Android Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
Zhen Hu, Bruno Vieira Resende E. Silva, Hamid Bagheri,
Witawas Srisa-an, Gregg Rothermel, and Jackson Dinh

REHANA: An Efficient Program Analysis Framework to Uncover Reflective

Code in Android . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Shakthi Bachala, Yutaka Tsutano, Witawas Srisa-an, Gregg Rothermel,
Jackson Dinh, and Yuanjiu Hu

A Route Guidance Method for Vehicles to Improve Driver’s Experienced

Delay Against Traffic Congestion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Yusuke Matsui and Takuya Yoshihiro

A Localization Method Using Reflected Luminance Distribution. . . . . . . . . . 390

Yoshihiro Yamashita, Shota Shimada, Hiromichi Hashizume,
Hiroki Watanabe, and Masanori Sugimoto
 Contents xiii

Is Adding More Modalities Better in a Multimodal Spatio-temporal

Prediction Scenario? A Case Study on Japan Air Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
Yutaro Mishima, Guillaume Habault, and Shinya Wada

Expanding the Positioning Area for Acoustic Localization Using COTS

Mobile Devices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
Takumi Suzaki, Masanari Nakamura, Hiroaki Murakami,
Hiroki Watanabe, Hiromichi Hashizume, and Masanori Sugimoto

Body Part Detection from Neonatal Thermal Images Using

Deep Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
Fumika Beppu, Hiroki Yoshikawa, Akira Uchiyama, Teruo Higashino,
Keisuke Hamada, and Eiji Hirakawa

The MARBLE Dataset: Multi-inhabitant Activities of Daily Living

Combining Wearable and Environmental Sensors Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
Luca Arrotta, Claudio Bettini, and Gabriele Civitarese

Comparative Analysis of High- and Low-Performing Factory Workers

with Attention-Based Neural Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
Qingxin Xia, Atsushi Wada, Takanori Yoshii, Yasuo Namioka,
and Takuya Maekawa

Human Localization Using a Single Camera Towards Social Distance

Monitoring During Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
Ryosuke Hasegawa, Akira Uchiyama, Fumio Okura, Daigo Muramatsu,
Issei Ogasawara, Hiromi Takahata, Ken Nakata, and Teruo Higashino

Vehicle Routing for Incremental Collection of Disaster Information

Along Streets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487
Yuga Maki, Wenju Mu, Masahiro Shibata, and Masato Tsuru

Smartwatch-Based Face-Touch Prediction Using Deep Representational

Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493
Hamada Rizk, Tatsuya Amano, Hirozumi Yamaguchi,
and Moustafa Youssef

Radar-Based Gesture Recognition Towards Supporting Communication

in Aphasia: The Bedroom Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500
Luís Santana, Ana Patrícia Rocha, Afonso Guimarães,
Ilídio C. Oliveira, José Maria Fernandes, Samuel Silva,
and António Teixeira

Wi-Fi CSI-Based Activity Recognition with Adaptive Sampling Rate

Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507
Yuka Tanno, Takuya Maekawa, and Takahiro Hara
xiv Contents

Air Handling Unit Explainability Using Contextual Importance and Utility. . . 513
Avleen Malhi, Manik Madhikermi, Matti Huotari, and Kary Främling

Internet of Robot Things in a Dynamic Environment: Narrative-Based

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 520
Sabri Lyazid

The First Workshop on Ubiquitous and Multi-domain

User Modeling (UMUM2021)

An Empirical Study on News Recommendation in Multiple Domain

Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Shuichiro Haruta and Mori Kurokawa

Concept Drift Detection with Denoising Autoencoder in Incomplete Data . . . 541

Jun Murao, Kei Yonekawa, Mori Kurokawa, Daichi Amagata,
Takuya Maekawa, and Takahiro Hara

Synthetic People Flow: Privacy-Preserving Mobility Modeling from

Large-Scale Location Data in Urban Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553
Naoki Tamura, Kenta Urano, Shunsuke Aoki, Takuro Yonezawa,
and Nobuo Kawaguchi

A Study on Metrics for Concept Drift Detection Based on Predictions

and Parameters of Ensemble Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568
Kei Yonekawa, Shuichiro Haruta, Tatsuya Konishi, Kazuhiro Saito,
Hideki Asoh, and Mori Kurokawa

Event-Driven Interest Detection for Task-Oriented Mobile Apps . . . . . . . . . . 582

Fernando Kaway Carvalho Ota, Farouk Damoun,
Sofiane Lagraa, Patricia Becerra-Sanchez, Christophe Atten,
Jean Hilger, and Radu State

The First International Workshop on Smart Society

Technologies (IWSST2021)

Caring Without Sharing: A Federated Learning Crowdsensing Framework

for Diversifying Representation of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
Michael Cho and Afra Mashhadi

AR-T: Temporal Relation Embedded Transformer for the Real World

Activity Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617
Hyunju Kim and Dongman
 Contents xv

Analysis of The Effects of Cognitive Stress on the Reliability

of Participatory Sensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 634
Rio Yoshikawa, Yuki Matsuda, Kohei Oyama, Hirohiko Suwa,
and Keiichi Yasumoto

Design and Implementation of an Online and Cost-Effective Attendance

Management System Using Smartphones and Cloud Services . . . . . . . . . . . . 650
M. Fahim Ferdous Khan, Taisei Yamazaki, and Ken Sakamura

Daily Health Condition Estimation Using a Smart Toothbrush

with Halitosis Sensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 665
Satoshi Yoshimura, Teruhiro Mizumoto, Yuki Matsuda, Keita Ueda,
and Akira Takeyama

The Fourth International Workshop on Mobile Ubiquitous Systems,

Infrastructures, Communications and AppLications
(MUSICAL 2021 Fall)

Collision-Free Channel Assignment with Overlapped Channels

in Multi-radio Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681
Yi Tian and Takuya Yoshihiro

Evaluating Multiple-Access Protocols: Asynchronous Pulse Coding vs.

Carrier-Sense with Collision Avoidance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693
Kenji Leibnitz, Ferdinand Peper, Konstantinos Theofilis,
Mikio Hasegawa, and Naoki Wakamiya

Rate Control for Multi-link and Multi-relay Wireless LANs Supporting

Real-Time Mobile Data Transmissions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707
Kazuki Ikeda, Shohei Omoto, Hiroyuki Yomo, Yoshihisa Kondo,
and Hiroyuki Yokoyama

Quality Analysis of Audio-Video Transmission in an OFDM-Based

Communication System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 724
Monika Zamlynska, Grzegorz Debita, and Przemyslaw Falkowski-Gilski

Coordinated Multi-UAV Adaptive Exploration Under Recurrent

Connectivity Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737
Yaqianwen Su, Dianxi Shi, Chao Xue, Jiachi Xu, and Xionghui He

The Evaluation of the Angled Antenna Based Direction Estimation

Scheme for RFID Tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 754
Kota Mizuno, Katsuhiro Naito, and Masaki Ehara
xvi Contents

A Method for Expressing Intention for Suppressing Careless Responses

in Participatory Sensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 769
Kohei Oyama, Yuki Matsuda, Rio Yoshikawa, Yugo Nakamura,
Hirohiko Suwa, and Keiichi Yasumoto

A Privacy-Aware Browser Extension to Track User Search Behavior

for Programming Course Supplement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783
Jihed Makhlouf, Yutaka Arakawa, and Ko Watanabe

Building a Crowdsensing Platform Based on Spatio-Temporal Fencing . . . . . 797

Nobuhito Miyagawa, Ryoga Tsuchimoto, Shota Suzaki,
and Katsuhiko Kaji

Innovative Technologies for the Healthcare Empowerment

(InnovTech4Health)

WatchID: Wearable Device Authentication via

Reprogrammable Vibration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 813
Jerry Q. Cheng, Zixiao Wang, Yan Wang, Tianming Zhao, Hao Wan,
and Eric Xie

Premises Based Smart Door Chains System Using IoT Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . 834
Abdul Hannan, Faisal Hussain, Sehrish Munawar Cheema,
and Ivan Miguel Pires

A Multimodal Approach to Synthetic Personal Data Generation

with Mixed Modelling: Bayesian Networks, GAN’s and Classification
Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 847
Irina Deeva, Andrey Mossyayev, and Anna V. Kalyuzhnaya

MeAct: A Non-obstructive Persuasive End-to-End Platform for Active

and Healthy Ageing Support. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 860
John Gialelis, Vassilis Tsakanikas, Nikos Tsafas, Kostas Stergiou,
and Vassilis Triantafyllou

Brain Activity Analysis of Stressed and Control Groups in Response to

High Arousal Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 872
Wardah Batool, Sanay Muhammad Umar Saeed, and Muhammad Majid

Short Papers

A Method for Estimating Actual Swimming Distance Using an

Accelerometer and Gyroscope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887
Daisuke Watanabe and Kazuya Murao
 Contents xvii

Design and Implementation of a Finger Sack with an Electrode Array

to Generate Multi-touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 890
Marina Okamoto and Kazuya Murao

A Method for Identifying Individuals Entering a Bathtub Using a Water

Pressure Sensor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893
Naoki Kurata and Kazuya Murao

Designing a Smartphone-Based Assistance System for Blind People

to Recognize Intersections and Obstacles in Indoor Corridors . . . . . . . . . . . . 896
Masaki Kuribayashi, Seita Kayukawa, Jayakorn Vongkulbhisal,
Chieko Asakawa, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi,
and Shigeo Morishima

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 899

MobiQuitous 2021
 Event Detection and Event-Relevant
Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility

Naoto Takeda(B) , Daisuke Kamisaka, Roberto Legaspi, Yutaro Mishima,

and Atsunori Minamikawa

KDDI Research, Inc., Fujimino-shi, Saitama 356-8502, Japan

{no-takeda,da-kamisaka,ro-legaspi,yu-mishima,
at-minamikawa}@kddi-research.jp

Abstract. Event detection has been proved important in various appli-

cations, such as route selection to avoid the congestion an event causes
or deciding whether to join an event that one is interested in. While
geotagged tweets are popular sources of information for event detection,
they are usually insufficient for accurate detection when scarce. On the
other hand, non-geotagged tweets are more abundant, but include much
noise that also deters accurate event detection. In this work, we aimed
to enhance detection performance by combining aggregated smartphone
GPS data and non-geotagged tweets. We propose a novel method to
detect events based on deviations from inferred normal human mobil-
ity, selecting event-related topics that correlated with human mobility,
and extracting event-relevant tweets by scoring each tweet according to
its relevance to an event. The relevance of each tweet is gauged from
the tweet’s meaning and posting time. We conducted empirical evalua-
tions using data that include multiple events, such as baseball game and
airport congestion. Our proposed method detected 9 out of 10 events
regardless of the type and scale of the events, which attests improve-
ment over the geotag-based method. We also confirmed that our model
was able to extract the essential event-relevant tweets with an average
accuracy of over 90%.

Keywords: Event detection · Congestion detection · Topic

extraction · Tweet extraction · Human mobility

1 Introduction

Event detection leverages changes in crowd density in a given location to detect

crowd events [8,18,30]. An event is defined as “something that happens at spe-
cific time and place with consequence” [3], e.g., a festival or a train accident.
These events have the potential to cause congestion, i.e., high crowd density,
[14] (hereafter, “events” are limited to those that cause congestion). With event
detection, it is important to grasp what is occurring [33] independent of event
type, i.e., scheduled or unscheduled, as well as event scale, i.e., large or small,
c ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2022
Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All Rights Reserved
T. Hara and H. Yamaguchi (Eds.): MobiQuitous 2021, LNICST 419, pp. 3–23, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94822-1_1
4 N. Takeda et al.

for people to act efficiently and appropriately, such as to avoid congestion or

participate if they are interested. For instance, if a person notices that there is
a congestion of people at a certain station due to a train accident (unscheduled
event), he will take another station. Or, if somebody is sightseeing and notices
congestion in the vicinity due to a festival (scheduled event), she might decide to
join the festivities. Currently more compelling is during the COVID-19 pandemic
in which there is increasing demand to detect an event that is accompanied by
increasing crowd size to prevent a potential superspreader event from growing.
Research on event detection has garnered wide interest in recent years, espe-
cially at this age where social media have become ubiquitous. Twitter is one of
the most frequently used data sources for event detection due to its immedi-
acy. Most studies relied on geotagged tweets to identify locations [16,31,37,38]
and to extract tweets that helped people understand the events in detail (i.e.,
event-relevant tweets). However, the number of geotagged tweets is usually very
small (0.9% of all tweets [7,23]), which is decreasing even further in recent years
[17]. On the other hand, while non-geotagged tweets are abundant in number,
they also pose a challenge since they are accompanied by considerable noise, i.e.,
event-irrelevant tweets. As alternative, human mobility data aggregated from
smartphone GPS readings is often used to detect congestion occurring in cities.
Several studies that used human mobility data identified locations where con-
gestion is occurring in a city by focusing on anomalies, i.e., abnormal concen-
tration of population density in grid cells [14,27]. Human mobility can be rep-
resented as time series data indicative of the increase or decrease in population
per grid cell for each timeslot by computing the unique users from GPS read-
ings [14,27,28]. Utilizing these GPS-based methods is one solution to detecting
the event that caused congestion. However, such human mobility data does not
include information on the cause of events, such as traffic accidents, daily rush
hours, or population concentration caused by a major festival. Lastly, super-
vised and unsupervised approaches in machine learning have been proposed,
albeit both present significant limitations. Notably, while supervised approaches
demand a lot of manual annotations [4,9,15], unsupervised approaches require
manual inspection to discover the event-relevant tweets [1].
To address the challenges above, we propose an unsupervised event detection
approach that is agnostic to event type and scale, and employs human mobil-
ity data aggregated from smart phone GPS readings. Further, we also propose
an accompanying event-relevant tweet extraction method using non-geotagged
tweets. The details are as follows.
(1) Event detection: To detect events, we infer normal human mobility
pattern for each grid cell using past human mobility data, and we compute
an anomaly score that represents the difference between the inferred normal
mobility and the present mobility per grid cell. Our method detects an event
when the anomaly score exceeds a predefined threshold that is indicative of the
intensity of congestion.
(2) Event-relevant tweet extraction: Also in this study, event-relevant
tweets are extracted as information for understanding an occurring event. Our
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 5

method extracts event-relevant tweets from noisy non-geotagged tweets in three

steps. First, our method collects tweets only if they include the POI (point of
interest) name that is associated to the grid cell in which the event is detected.
Second, our method vectorizes the each tweet and clusters tweets with similar
topics, and then selects the event-related cluster based on the correlation between
human mobility and topic transitions of the cluster. Finally, our method extracts
event-relevant tweets based on three scores, which focus on (a) the topic of the
tweet, (b) coupling of the tweet’s posting time and human mobility, and (c)
coupling of the tweet’s posting time and event-related topic transitions.
By tracking human mobility, our method can anticipate crowd congestion.
To our knowledge, there has yet to be a method for detecting a congestion event
while at the same time providing related information about such event. Our
contributions are threefold:

– a framework for detecting an event and extracting event-relevant tweets that

were not geotagged;
– an unsupervised event-relevant tweet extraction method from non-geotagged
and unannotated tweets based on correlations between topic transitions in
the tweets and human mobility transitions; and
– use of real-world datasets to evaluate and validate our method above that can
detect events independent of event type and scale, as well as extract essential
tweets related to the events.

2 Related Work

In this research, we tackle the problem of event detection from smartphone GPS
readings, and the extraction of informative event-relevant tweets that can help
people understand an event. We first describe in this section the existing, per-
tinent event detection research works. Afterwards, we describe existing research
on event-relevant tweet extraction.

2.1 Event Detection

A simple and intuitive approach to detecting events is to use installed monitoring

hardware. For instance, several studies have used surveillance cameras to detect
congestion [22,39]. However, in general, not all facilities and streets are equipped
with cameras, only some of the relatively lager facilities. Therefore, such an
approach cannot detect events in as many places as possible, especially those
small but perhaps crucial events that may happen in small facilities. Other event
detection methods related to commuting and transportation have been proposed
using railroad smart card history [35] and bus trajectories [21]. These methods
can capture unscheduled events such as train delays and road accidents. However,
they also rely heavily on specific domain data. For example, with a railroad smart
card history [35], only train station (domain) related data, e.g., sudden increase
in the number of people in a station (due to train accident), can be detected as
6 N. Takeda et al.

an event. Thus, there is a limit to the types of events that can be captured. Our
aim is to detect events occurring in a city independent of domain, event type
(scheduled or unscheduled) and scale. Hence, less constraining data sources and
methods are needed.
Twitter, one of the most popular social networking platforms today, is a
promising source of data for detecting various types of events in varying scale.
Many studies on event detection have focused on the burst, i.e., drastic increase
in volume, of event-related keywords in the Twitter stream [5,10,11,25,32]. How-
ever, keyword burst may not always be indicative of a congestion. Tweets also
burst when, say, a well-known celebrity dies or a grave disaster occurs in another
country, which are instances where observers of the event do not necessarily con-
centrate physically in the same place. These methods therefore may not shed
light on whether an event is causing real-world congestion. Some event detection
studies have leveraged geotagged tweets, which include location data of where
the tweets were posted, to identify the location of an event where there is concen-
tration of people [16,31,37,38]. However, only 0.9% of all tweets are geotagged
[7,23]. Moreover, the number of geotagged tweets decreased since June 2019
when geotagging options were removed [17]. Obviously, geotag-based methods
could no longer detect events when no geotagged tweets are posted.
Smartphone GPS is a city-level and situation-agnostic (no information about
the situation is provided) data source that has also recently garnered attention.
Smartphone GPS data are often collected via applications installed with user
permission [34], and it is possible to capture human mobility as an increase or
decrease in population by counting the number of unique users per grid cell
in each timeslot. Coinciding with this development is anomaly detection using
human mobility that is also getting the attention of the research community
[14,27,28]. For instance, Neumann et al. [28] proposed a method that uses a
day’s data of human mobility as a feature to classify whether the day is special
(e.g., December 24 or long weekends) or not by computing how much human
mobility on that day deviated from normal. However, a day’s worth of data
(24 h) is needed before classification can be achieved, which makes real-time
event detection difficult. The research works of Fuse et al. [14] and Mishima
et al. [27] are similar in that they detect anomalies emerging from grid cells in
real time. Fuse et al. [14] classified whether an anomaly occurred or not using a
sticky hierarchical Dirichlet process - hidden Markov model (sHDP-HMM). Fuse
et al.’s approach learns the latent state and hyperparameters of the training
data that represent the normal state, and the sHDP-HMM infers the latent
state of the test data with the learned hyperparameters. It compares the normal
state and the latent state of the test data, and detects an anomaly if they are
unequal. Mishima et al. [27] computed for an anomaly score that indicates the
difference from normal human mobility volume per grid cell, where this normalcy
is inferred using past human mobility data. An anomaly is detected when the
anomaly score exceeds a predefined threshold value. Both approaches, Fuse et
al. and Mishima et al., albeit promising for detecting events that have caused
congestion, only tested in their experiments train accidents, typhoons, and New
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 7

Year’s holidays, and there is no sufficient verification regarding event type and
scale. In addition, Fuse et al.’s approach was necessary to manually define one
day of normal human mobility as training data per grid cell, while Mishima
et al.’s approach automatically estimates normal human mobility from multiple
days. To avoid overfitting of training data and to automatically estimate normal
human mobility for a large number of grid cells, we applied Mishima et al.’s
approach to event detection for a variety of event types and scales, and verified
its limitations.
Note that since GPS-based event detection does not provide information
to people on what kind of event is occurring, we need to extract such missing
information from event-relevant tweets (see below).

2.2 Understanding Events with Event-Relevant Tweets

To understand an event in detail, one solution is to extract tweets that provide

a lot of information describing the event (e.g., posts by users who are enjoy-
ing a festival or news about a train accident), hence, the event-relevant tweets.
In recent years, several studies have been conducted to extract event-relevant
tweets. There are those that have used supervised learning, with labeled tweets
as training data, to classify whether each tweet is event-relevant or not [4,9,15].
For example, Chen et al. [9] used the CBOW model to embed tweets and classi-
fied them into traffic-relevant and traffic-irrelevant tweets using CNN and LSTM.
These studies require manual annotations of the collected tweets, which is expen-
sive and not scalable. It becomes insurmountable for this methods to detect all
events while being non-cognizant of event type or scale since with more types
and varying sizes of events are more annotated training data needed.
There are also research works on event-relevant tweet extraction using unsu-
pervised learning. Ahmed et al. [1], for example, extracted event-relevant tweets
by clustering tweets that contained event-related words (e.g., for traffic events,
“traffic” and “accident”). Specifically, tweets were vectorized using TF-IDF and
k-means. The event-related clusters were manually discovered from among clus-
ters, and tweets that belonged to these clusters were considered event-relevant
tweets. However, manual cluster discovery, manual setting of event-related words,
and manual setting of an appropriate number of clusters are required, are non-
trivial, and needless to say, laborious.
Our work, on the other hand, focuses on the correlation between human
mobility and tweet topic transition. Our method automatically selects topics
and their essential tweets relevant to the event without necessitating manual
annotation and geotagged tweets. We elucidate our method in the next section.

3 Proposed Method
We now describe our approach for detecting events and extracting event-relevant
tweets. Figure 1 shows the framework of our approach. First, our method detects
an event in a grid cell, which indicates a higher than normal concentration of
8 N. Takeda et al.

Fig. 1. Framework of our approach

human mobility in that location, by calculating from GPS data the number
of unique users in a grid cell. Next, our method extracts event-relevant tweets
useful for understanding what is occurring in the event using the POI names
associated to grid cell where the event is detected. To extract event-relevant
tweets regardless of event types and scales, event-related topics that correlate
with human mobility are selected and three scores are computed for each tweet
considering the tweet’s meaning and the posting time. We detail these below.

3.1 Event Detection from Smartphone GPS Data

We adopted the approach of Mishima and colleagues [27] for event detection. We
use smartphone GPS data that consists of a timestamp, latitude and longitude
to compute for human mobility. The basic idea is to infer what a normal human
mobility per grid cell is using past human mobility data, and then to compute
an anomaly score based on how the magnitude of the current human mobility
deviates from the inferred normal human mobility. Our method detects an event
for each timeslot (i.e., a unit of time in which the population in a grid cell is
aggregated using GPS) when the anomaly score exceeds a predefined threshold
value.
The method of Mishima et al. [27] infers normal human mobility for each
grid cell, as well as day-group, i.e., the characteristics of each day (e.g., weekday,
weekend/holiday, or first day of a consecutive holiday) because human mobility
trends are different between weekdays and weekends. First, the method divides
the smartphone GPS data to each grid cell and day-group according to latitude,
longitude, and timestamp, and computes human mobility transitions, where
human mobility is the number of unique users in a grid cell. Hereafter, event
detection for a single grid cell c is described and the same process is applied to
all grid cells. The human mobility dataset V is the number of unique users per
each day-group and per each timeslot, and is represented as: V ∈ RNg ,Nt , where
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 9

Ng is the number of day-groups defined, Nt is the number of timeslots per day

(e.g., 96 if the time interval is 15 min). It then clusters the human mobility data
for each day-group and computes the average of human mobility for each cluster.
The clustering is performed for each combination of day-group g to obtain clus-
ters CLg , represented as: CLg = {clg,i | i = 1, 2, . . . , K} = kmeans(vg ∈ V , K),
where clg,i is the i-th cluster, vg is Nt -dimensional human mobility and K is a
parameter indicating the number of clusters. The cluster with high human mobil-
ity is not suited to indicate normal human mobility because it may contain days
when anomalies occurred. Thus, the average of each timeslot of human mobility
is computed for each cluster, and the cluster with the smallest sum of these
values is selected as the normalcy baseline in each grid cell. The cluster which
represents the normal human mobility clg,i∗ is selected as the minimum sum of
all Nt -dimensional volumes (i.e., the number of unique users for each time slot)
as follows:
Nt

clg,i∗ = arg min μi,t , (1)
i∈{1,...,K} t=1

where μi is the mean vector of human mobility in cluster clg,i . The normal
human mobility is defined as the mean and standard deviation of clg,i∗ , i.e.,
μg,i∗ = {μg,i∗ ,t | t = 1, 2, . . . , Nt }, σg,i∗ = {σg,i∗ ,t | t = 1, 2, . . . , Nt }. From here
we derive the anomaly score Ag,t for current state of human mobility vg,t as the
z-score, that is,
vg,t − μg,i∗ ,t
Ag,t = . (2)
σg,i∗ ,t
The following then becomes the function for detecting an event:

true, if Ag,t > φ
IsEvent(Ag,t ) = (3)
false, otherwise.
where φ is the predefined threshold value. As an example, with the process above,
event detection is performed every 15 min across the 250 m × 250 m grid cells
throughout the city.

3.2 Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction

Our method extracts event-relevant tweets in three steps: tweet collection with
POI names, event-related topic selection, and tweet scoring. First, it collects
tweets containing POI names related to grid cells triggered by the event detec-
tion. We constructed in advance a grid cell-POI database that directly associates
the grid cells to the POI names they contain. This database is automatically
created from an open dataset containing the POI names, latitudes, and longi-
tudes. For example, the open dataset includes POI names for sports facilities
such as “Tokyo Dome (a stadium in Japan)”, train stations such as “Shibuya
Station (a train station in Japan)”, theaters, parks, airports, and schools. We
10 N. Takeda et al.

represent the grid cell-POI database as P , where Pc denotes the multiple POI
names contained in grid cell c. When an anomaly is detected in grid cell c at
time slot te , tweets that include POI names from that cell are extracted, i.e.,
T Wc = {twt | pc ∈ Pc , 1 ≤ t ≤ te }. Tweets twt are tweets posted at timeslot
t. Obviously, here, tweets posted only before the event detection time are used.
Note, however, that even if we collect tweets that include the POI names, they
could still include considerable amount of tweets that are not event-relevant.
Hereafter, we omit the subscript c to describe the event-relevant tweet extrac-
tion for a single grid cell c.
Next, our method performs clustering on T W based on semantics, i.e., fea-
ture vectors to select a cluster that has the highest relevance to the event, i.e.,
event-related topic. Each tweet is vectorized with a pretrained BERT (Bidirec-
tional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model [12] to learn the rep-
resentation of semantic distance between tweets. BERT is a Transformer-based
language representation model that can vectorize sentences in a context-aware
manner. BERT encodes T W into feature vectors F = {fi | i = 1, 2, . . . , N },
where fi is the average feature vector of all wordsM included in a tweet and
1
represents the meaning of twi , i.e., fi = M j=1 BERT(wj ∈ W ), where
W = {wj | wj ∈ twi , j = 1, 2, . . . , M } and M is the number of words in twi .
Afterwards, we apply k-means clustering to segregate the tweets into some topics
towards extracting an event-related topic. Tweet topics T P are extracted by k-
means using T P = {tpi | i = 1, 2, . . . , L} = kmeans(F , L). There are efforts to
vectorize documents (or words) with BERT and cluster similar meanings with k-
means, and the effectiveness of these efforts have been verified [19,26]. However,
methods for automatically determining the number of clusters have not been
sufficiently explored. Thus, in our study, to discover the optimal number of clus-
ters L∗ , we increment L in sequence and evaluate the clustering result for each
L based on the correlation of time series changes between human mobility and
topic transitions. A topic transition is a time series of the number of tweets in
each topic for each timeslot (Fig. 2(a)). Topic transition for a tpi is represented
as T Vi = {|twt | | twt ∈ T W , 1 ≤ t ≤ te }. Considering that topics appearing
in tweets are mostly independent, only event-related topics are expected to be
highly correlated with human mobility (Fig. 2(b)). When human mobility data
is V = {vt ∈ V | 1 ≤ t ≤ te } and event-related topic is (tpo ∈ T P ), our
assumption is T Vo ∝ V . We compute the correlation and independence score
(CI) for each L. CIL is computed using the following:

 
cov (T Vi , V )
max1≤i≤L
σ (T Vi ) σ (V )
CIL =  , (4)
cov (T Vi , T Vj )
maxi=j
σ (T Vi ) σ (T Vj )
∗
L = arg max CIL , (5)
L

where σ(T Vi ) is the standard deviation of T Vi , and cov(T Vi , T Vj ) is the covari-

ance of T Vi and T Vj . The denominator in Eq. (4) indicates the highest correla-
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 11

Fig. 2. Topic transitions and human mobility in a grid cell with an anomaly caused
at 18:00. Topic 3 is selected as event-related topic because of its high correlation with
human mobility.

tion value between topics (a low value indicates that the topics are independent
of each other), and the numerator indicates the highest correlation value between
human mobility transition and each topic transition (a high value indicates that
the topic correlated with human mobility is included). Thus, if the CIL is high,
the clustering result indicates that the topics are independent of each other and
contain topics that are highly correlated with human mobility transition. Ulti-
mately, we adopt the value of L that maximizes CIL as the optimal value L∗ .
We select the topic tpo that has the maximum correlation with human mobility
as an event-related topic containing the event-relevant tweets when the number
of clusters is L∗ . Figure 2(a) shows an example of extracted topics, with L∗ = 4,
from a grid cell with a detected event. The correlations between human mobility
(Fig. 2(b)) and Topic 0 to 3 were 0.64, 0.37, 0.77, and 0.86, respectively. Thus,
our approach selected Topic 3 (red line in Fig. 2(a)) as an event-related topic tpo .
Although there is a burst of tweets in Topic 0 (blue line in Fig. 2(a)) at 12:30 due
to an announcement of a future event, our approach successfully identified it as
the topic that was not related to the event. Our method can therefore eliminate
such noisy topic.
Finally, we scored each tweet to extract those that are especially relevant
to the event from the plethora of tweets that belong to tpo . The top scoring
tweets allow the user to understand what is occurring in the grid cell where the
event is detected. To extract the event-relevant tweets, we focus not only on
the meaning of the tweets, but also tweet posting time because such tweets are
frequently posted at relevant times, such as during or just before the event. We
consider the time when event-relevant tweets are likely to be posted depends on
the event type. For example, during a festival, tweets from people enjoying the
festival are posted while the festival is on-going, i.e., when the human mobility
volume is high. On the other hand, during a live concert, people do not tweet
while watching, instead, so many tweets are posted just before the concert starts
i.e., when event-related topics are frequently posted (they are posted after the
event as well, but we need to extract tweets at the event detection time, such
as before the event starts or during the event). Thus, to extract event-relevant
tweets, we defined three different weighting schemes based on three hypotheses.
12 N. Takeda et al.

I. Event-relevant tweets are located close in the feature space to the average
feature vector of tweets belonging to event-related topic.
II. Event-relevant tweets are more likely to be posted during times when there
are more event participants.
III. Event-relevant tweets are more likely to be posted during the times when
the event-related topics appear more frequently.

We start by defining the D-Score based on H-I (H, henceforth, stands for
hypothesis). We consider the tweets that are representative of a topic are dis-
tributed close to the average feature vector of tweets with the event-related topic,
inspired by existing document representative phrase extraction method [6]. We
obtained the topic vector by averaging vectors in the event-related topic, i.e.,
t-vec = μtp o . The D-Score reflects the distance from the t-vec to each tweet in
the feature space. A tweet with a higher D-Score indicates that it is semantically
similar to the t-vec. The D-Score in the tweet tw ∈ tpo is computed using the
following equations, normalized by the z-score:

1 N
cos(tw, t-vec) − cos(twi , t-vec)
D-Scoretw =  N i , (6)
1 N 1 N 2
(cos(twi , t-vec) − cos(twi , t-vec))
N i N i
where cos(tw, t-vec) is the cosine similarity between tw and t-vec, N is the
number of tweets belonging to tpo , i.e., N = |tpo |.
Second, we defined the HV -Score based on H-II. Even if the tweets are
about an event-related topics, they may contain event-irrelevant tweets. Thus,
we consider that during high human mobility, event participants and people
caught in the crowds post numerous event-relevant tweets, and assume that the
more likely a tweet is posted at a time human mobility volume is high, the more
likely also it will be an event-relevant tweet. We therefore focus on weighting
tweets based on human mobility. The HV -Score indicates the relative human
mobility transition per timeslot, and can be computed in the posting timeslot t
as

vt − μV
HV -Scoret = , (7)
σV
where μV and σV are the mean and standard deviation, respectively, of the
human mobility transition.
Third, we defined the P T -Score based on H-III. Our method weights each
tweet based on the number of tweets on the event-related topic. For events such
as live concerts and stage performances, the number of tweets decreases during
the event because people participating in the event refrain from posting tweets.
Instead, users post numerous tweets about their expectations of participating in
the event just before the event starts. Thus, for such events, weight should be
given to tweets posted when there are many posts about an event-related topic.
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 13

The P T -Score indicates the number of posted tweets regarding the event-related
topic in each timeslot, and is computed in the posting timeslot t as

|twt | − μT V o
P T -Scoret = , (8)
σT V o

where μT V o and σT V o are the mean and standard deviation, respectively, of the
number of posted tweets about the event-related topics.
Note that we normalized each score above using z-score so that these differ-
ent scores can be added together. In the succeeding section, we show how we
combined these three scores to come up with four different scoring schemes and
then compare how they contribute to our method’s performance.

4 Experiments
We evaluated our method in two experiments. We first describe here in detail
the datasets we used, and then describe our experiment set-up to evaluate the
detection capability of our method compared to geotag-based method, given both
scheduled and unscheduled events at different scales (Experiment-I). Finally,
we describe our event-relevant tweet extraction experiment to evaluate whether
users can understand what is occurring in the event (i.e., the cause and time of
the event) by referring to the extracted tweets (Experiment-II).

4.1 Datasets

We created datasets for each experiment1 because there are no open datasets
with human mobility data attached to a tweet dataset. Our target events include
nine scheduled events and five unscheduled events as shown in Table 1. We
selected events that can elicit behavior responses from people, such as those
that affect urban traffic flow and stimulate users to consider avoiding traffic
congestion (e.g., due to baseball game or train delay) or draw people in to par-
ticipate (e.g., festival, live concert). We also considered these events to have had
hundreds to hundreds of thousands of participants in order for us to examine
the effect of differences in scale. For the human mobility data, we aggregated
the smartphone GPS data of users who agreed to provide their location data,
which were collected by an application made by a Japanese mobile carrier. The
minimum time interval for each GPS data instance was two minutes, with the
sampling rate depending on the smartphone’s model and signal conditions. We
utilized GPS readings that were collected between May 1, 2019 and Sept. 30,
2020 from several million people. The human mobility data were computed every
15 min (i.e., Nt = 96) in 250 m × 250 m grid cells in Japan’s Tokyo and Aichi
prefectures.
1
We cannot disclose the number of tweets and the number of people in each experi-
ment due to the agreed terms of use.
14 N. Takeda et al.

Table 1. Details of the target events. If the number of participants in an event was not
officially announced (e.g., unscheduled events), the maximum capacity of the venue is
provided instead. The times of the events are the officially announced times of their
occurrence.

Event type ID POI name Event name Event date and No. of participants
time
Scheduled A Meiji Jingu Stadium Baseball game July 29, 2020 4,982
events (large scale stadiums) 18:00 ˜
B TOHO CINEMAS Opening a branch July 03, 2020 9:00 Up to 1,735
Ikebukuro (movie ˜
theatre)
C Shinjuku BLAZE (small Live concert July 11, 2020 Up to 800
concert venue) 12:30 ˜
D Shinjuku LOFT (small Live concert Sep. 27, 2020 Up to 550
concert venue) 17:15 ˜
E Shibuya Eggman (small Live concert Sep. 09, 2020 Up to 350
concert venue) 19:45 ˜
F Tokyo Dome (large scale Baseball game July 26, 2019 45,817
stadiums) 18:00 ˜
G Tokyo Big Sight Sales exhibition July 14, 2019 Approx. 48,000a
(convention center) 11:00 ˜
H Nagoya Dome (large Live concert May 26, 2019 49,692
scale stadiums) 16:00 ˜
I Port of Nagoya Fireworks festival July 15, 2019 Approx. 360,000
19:00 ˜ (total for one day)
Unscheduled J Ikebukuro Station Train delay June 29, 2020 Approx. 560,000
events 08:30 ˜ (total for one day)
K Sugamo Station Unannounced street July 03, 2020 Approx. 76,000
speech by a politician 12:00 ˜ (total for one day)
L Tokyo International Heavy congestion Sep. 19, 2020b Approx. 200,000
Airport (total for one day)
M Shibuya Station Train delay June 29, 2020 Approx. 360,000
08:30 ˜ (total for one day)
N Oizumi-gakuen Station Train delay Sep. 03, 2020 Approx. 87,000
17:40 ˜ (total for one day)
a
Calculate the average number of participants per event based on the number of participants and the
number of events per year.
b
The time is not described because it is not clear what time the congestion occurred.

As for the tweet datasets, we used both geotagged and non-geotagged tweets
containing POI names. The tweet datasets were sampled from 10% of all tweets
posted within Japan. In Exp-I, we used geotagged tweets as baseline by aggre-
gating the time series of hourly geotagged tweet volumes on a per grid-cell basis
in the month in which the target event occurred. For Exp-II, we used tweets
containing the grid cell-associated POI names. We created the grid cell-POI
database by processing an open dataset2 that contains the latitude and longi-
tude of major and local POIs within Japan. BERT for vectorizing each tweet
is pretrained on Wikipedia3 , and this model is often used to vectorize Japanese
tweets [2,36].

2
https://nlftp.mlit.go.jp/ksj/index.html.
3
https://github.com/cl-tohoku/bert-japanese.
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 15

4.2 Experiment-I: Event Detection Experiment

Our method and comparative methods were evaluated on whether each target
event was detected in the grid cell where it occurred. The event-detection time
was also evaluated because if the target event could be anticipated early or
detected quickly, relevant information could be delivered before people are caught
in a congestion or before the event is over.
We defined the number of day groups Ng = 8 (i.e., 2 × 2 × 2) according
to whether the day, previous day, and next day are either weekday or week-
end/holiday considering that human mobility vary depending on the day of the
week as well as the type of the previous or succeeding day (e.g., even on the
same weekday, Wednesdays and Fridays should be different day groups.). We
computed for normal human mobility using data within the past two months
before a target event occurred. We performed k-means clustering to compute
the normal human mobility in each grid cell, searched for the parameters that
would optimally detect the correct events, and set the number of clusters K = 2
and the threshold φ = 3. We explain below the technical details.
The most common conventional event detection approach is a geotag-based
method. However, it will not be able to accurately detect events because the
number of geotagged tweets is very small now (e.g., only 17 geotagged tweets
were posted throughout the day in event L). We benchmarked two compara-
tive methods (henceforth, CM) using the SR approach [29], a state-of-the-art
unsupervised anomaly detection method. We denoted as CM-1 the SR-based
approach that uses the transition of the number of geotagged tweets per hour,
CM-2 the SR-based approach that uses human mobility data, and we denote our
proposed method as PM. SR approach can detect anomalies using a saliency
map even if similar patterns have not appeared in the past. For both human
mobility data and changes in tweet volume, the shape of the time series differs
greatly depending on the event type, e.g., the amount of data increases rapidly
in the case of train accidents, but on the other hand, gradually increases before
the start of the event in the case of concert events. The SR method is suitable
as a comparison method because it has been verified to be robust to various
shapes of time series data [29]. As SR hyperparameters, the threshold τ is set
to 3, the number of estimated points ρ is set to 5, and the sliding window size ω
is set to 30, respectively, based on the search for the best parameters for event
detection. Note that non-geotagged tweets cannot be used for Exp-I because it
is impossible to identify the location in small grid cell units.
Table 2 shows the results of Exp-I. PM detected 9 out of 10 events, contrast
with CM-1 that detected only 3 events and CM-2 with just 4 events. PM detected
events B, D, J, K, M, and N that were not detected by CM-1. In these events,
no geotagged tweets were posted around the time of the event. CM-1 detected
events A, C, and L, but only a very small number of geotagged tweets were
posted at that time (up to three tweets for event L), so if a few geotagged tweets
are posted in a grid cell, the event may be falsely detected. Also, PM detected
events B, C, D, K, and M that were not detected by CM-2. We confirmed that
human mobility in these events was different from the normal human mobility,
16 N. Takeda et al.

although the magnitude of the peaks themselves was not large. Therefore, it is
considered that PM could detect these events.

Table 2. Results of Exp-I. The number in parentheses indicates the difference between
event detection time and event occurrence time.

Event type ID POI name Event date and PM CM-1 CM-2

time
Scheduled A Meiji Jingu July 29, 2020 −75 ±0 +60
events Stadium 18:00˜
B TOHO CINEMAS July 03, 2020 −15 × ×
Ikebukuro 09:00˜
C Shinjuku BLAZE July 11, 2020 −15 −30 ×
12:30˜
D Shinjuku LOFT Sep. 27, 2020 −30 × ×
17:15˜
E Shibuya Eggman Sep. 09, 2020 × × ×
19:45˜
Unscheduled J Ikebukuro Station June 29, 2020 +15 × +60
events 08:30 ˜
K Sugamo Station July 03, 2020 +30 × ×
12:00 ˜
L Tokyo International Sep. 19, 2020 −15a ±0 +105
Airport
M Shibuya Station June 29, 2020 +30 × ×
08:30 ˜
N Oizumi-gakuen Sep. 03, 2020 +5 × +15
Station 17:40 ˜
a
The difference between the detection time of the proposed method and CM-1.

Let us take for instance the ones in Fig. 3, which compares human mobil-
ity during normal days and the day-event for events A (baseball game) and K
(unannounced street speech). CM-1 and CM-2 detected event A that have sig-
nificant increase in human mobility (i.e., Fig. 3(a)), but did not detect the event
K that have relatively small increases (i.e., Figure 3(b)). PM was able to detect
even small increases in human mobility because it looks at the difference to the
normal human mobility transitions (difference between blue and orange lines in
Fig. 3(b)), whereas CM-2 did not because it only considers current transitions
in human mobility (orange line in Fig. 3(b)). Even if we set the threshold τ of
CM-2 to a smaller value, we may find event K, but at the same time, we will
find many false positives. Although PM was able to detect 9 out of 10 events
of different scales (ranging from 550 to 560,000 participants), a small-scale live
concert with up to 350 participants (i.e., event E) was not detected. This result
is due to the large number of people outside the venue, albeit within the grid
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 17

cell, as well as the relatively low impact of this small event (in case the number
of participants in the event is very small compared to vg,t,c ). The detection of
such relatively small-scale events may be achieved by setting an adjustable grid
cell, e.g., define the rectangular polygon data for concert venue individually.

Fig. 3. Comparison of human mobility between normal days and the day-event. The
highlighted blocks indicate the duration of the event.

PM detected on average 22 and 77.5 min earlier than CM-1 (for events A, C,
and L), and CM-2 (for events A, J, L, and N) respectively. For the scheduled
events, we assumed that people gradually gathered for the start-time of the
event, which caused congestion even before the event started. In Fig. 3(a), in
fact, we confirmed that people gradually gathered from approximately 16:00, two
hours before the event started at 18:00. PM detected the event at 16:45 (75 mins
earlier), while CM-1 detected it at 18:00 (±0 min), and CM-2 detected it at
19:00 (60 mins later). Thus, PM detected these events even before they started.
Further, we considered that the unscheduled events J, M, N (train delays), and
K (unannounced street speech), people gathered in the grid cell immediately
after the event starts, resulting in a sudden concentration of people in a short
period of time compared to scheduled events. In Fig. 3(b), we can see that people
gathered between 12:00 and 13:00 for event K, and PM was able to detect this
event in real time while congestion was occurring within that short duration.
The unscheduled event L (heavy congestion at an airport) does not have a clear
event occurrence time, but PM detected congestion at 6:00 in the morning,
15 min earlier than CM-1 and 120 min earlier than CM-2. CM-1 and CM-2 did
not detect the events until the time when people had clearly formed a crowd,
since it detects the events characterized by significant increase in human mobility.
What these results suggest is that PM can deliver information even before an
event congestion ends (i.e., with a maximum delay of 30 min, and a minimum of
75 min before the event starts), given different event types and scales.

4.3 Experiment-II: Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction Experiment

We now discuss our qualitatively evaluation of the extracted tweets, i.e., whether
they are relevant to the event or not. Annotators manually evaluated whether the
18 N. Takeda et al.

extracted tweets are effective for understanding the target events. We compared
among four scores, i.e., each with different strategies using variant combinations
of equations (6)–(8). Tweet extraction based solely on the D-Score is denoted
as M-1, D-Score + HV -Score as M-2, D-Score + P T -Score as M-3, and lastly,
D-Score + HV -Score + P T -Score as M-4. The optimal number of clusters L∗
for each event is automatically determined by our method (see Sect. 3.2). We
compared these four methods to two baselines:
– B-1: The most intuitive and simple method assumes that tweets with a post-
ing time closer to the event-detection time are more likely to be event-relevant
tweets. The extracted tweets included POI names and ordered from the time
they were posted until close to the time that the event was detected.
– B-2: To verify the effectiveness of our method to select the event-related topic,
we extracted tweets that included POI names and ordered them based on their
distance to the centroid of all the tweets in the feature space without topic
clustering, i.e., the score of a tweet tw is computed as follows: B-2-Scoretw =
cos(tw, μT W ). This method is similar to techniques used in existing document
summarization tasks [6].
Using an existing study [24] as our reference, we manually evaluated the
relevance of the extracted tweets to the event in question. Each method scored
the tweets’ relevance to the event, and then the 10 tweets with the highest scores
were extracted as event-relevant tweets. Three annotators graded the value of
each tweet (420 tweets in total, since there are 6 methods and 7 events) on a
3-point scale. A grade of 2 means that the annotator can identify what event
is occurring (i.e., the cause and time of the event) by referring to the tweet. A
grade of 1 means one can identify what event, but other interpretations are also
possible. A grade of 0 means one cannot identify the event just by referring to the
tweet. Each method was evaluated by the percentage of tweets that were given
a grade of 2 by at least two annotators. Lastly here, we computed for Fleiss’
κ to measure the inter-rater agreement [13]. κ was 0.976 (an almost perfect
agreement) on all tweet grades provided by our three annotators. This suggests
that each tweet grade is highly reliable.
Table 3 shows the evaluation results we obtained, which demonstrate that
M-4 performs well on these datasets. In 5 out of 7 events, all 10 tweets that
were extracted are event-relevant. In particular, the M-4 score for the baseball
game at the Tokyo Dome (event F) is a significant improvement from B-2’s
(i.e., 0.70 and 0.20, respectively). The tweets extracted using B-1 and B-2 gave
out incorrect topics on events that were held at the same place. In event F for
instance, a popular singer announced during a baseball game via Twitter a future
live concert event at the Tokyo Dome, and many Twitter users simultaneously
posted tweets about that future event. Consequently, B-1 and B-2 incorrectly
extracted the tweets that were about the upcoming live concert instead of the
tweets about the ongoing baseball game. This is because B-1 and B-2 were not
able to select the event-related topic. However, M-4 incorrectly extracted a few
tweets that were not relevant to the event, specifically, 5 tweets at events F and
L out of all the 70 extracted tweets. These tweets coincidentally slipped into the
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 19

relevant topics at the time the event occurred. For instance, the irrelevant tweets
at Tokyo Dome (event F) included contents about baseball video games and
baseball games at the Tokyo Dome the following day. It is difficult to filter these
tweets because they are also tweets about baseball. To eliminate such tweets,
setting the appropriate stop words (e.g., “video”) or extracting the current tweets
by considering the tense of the tweet content would be effective. Further, our
method scored 0.80 on the heavy congestion at Tokyo International Airport
(event L), while B-2 scored 0.90 (however, one of the two irrelevant tweets was
given a grade of 2 by one annotator and 1 by two annotators). The 6 out of 10
tweets extracted using B-2 were short statements of user’s thoughts, citing the
same breaking news about the event (i.e., airport congestion). We found that
when many similar event-relevant tweets are posted at the same time and no
other topics are posted (i.e., less diversity in the semantics of the tweets), they
can be correctly extracted regardless of the topic. This suggest that it is possible
to not cluster the tweets if they are not widely distributed in the feature space
because such distribution indicates lack of semantic diversity among tweets.

Table 3. Results of the evaluation of each method

Event type ID POI name B-1 B-2 M-1 M-2 M-3 M-4
Scheduled events F Tokyo Dome 0.30 0.20 0.60 0.70 0.60 0.70
G Tokyo Big Sight 0.20 0.90 0.80 0.90 1.00 1.00
H Nagoya Dome 0.70 0.70 0.90 0.70 1.00 1.00
I Port of Nagoya 0.60 0.60 0.70 1.00 0.80 1.00
Unscheduled events L Tokyo International Airport 0.40 0.90 0.50 0.60 0.80 0.80
M Shibuya Station 0.50 0.90 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
N Oizumi-gakuen Station 0.90 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
Total average 0.51 0.74 0.79 0.84 0.89 0.93

Table 3 also shows the improvement in score with the addition of the
HV -Score (M-2 and M-4) for the fireworks festival at the Port of Nagoya (event
I). We confirmed that the event-relevant tweets about the festival were mostly
posted during the event. We can obtain a higher score by focusing on the times
when people are concentrating (HV -Score) rather than focusing on the times
when there are many tweets (P T -Score). However, for the live concert at Nagoya
Dome (event H), the score was improved by adding the P T -Score (M-3). We
can observe in Fig. 4 that the number of tweets drastically decreased during the
live concert because people participating in the event refrained from posting
tweets. In this case, the P T -Score is effective because it focuses on the time
when there are many tweets (i.e., 15:00). This suggests that it is important to
focus on both the human mobility transition and the number of tweets when
selecting the topics to extract for determining the event-relevant tweets.
20 N. Takeda et al.

Fig. 4. Number of tweets and human mobility transitions at the Nagoya Dome (event
H). The highlighted block indicates the duration of the event.

Table 4 shows sample tweets that were extracted using M-4 and are given
a grade of 2. We can identify what event is occurring at the POI by referring
to tweets like the one in Table 4. For example, in event I, users can understand
that congestion is occurring in a particular grid cell and that the cause of the
congestion is a festival, and if they are intrigued by the tweets, they might
consider participating. Also, in event M, users may consider changing their route
to avoid the congestion due to the train delay. In summary, our method that
considers these characteristics, D-Score + HV -Score + P T -Score, i.e., M-4, was
the most robust of the six methods independent to the type of event.

Table 4. Examples of extracted tweets using Method 4

ID POI name Event name Examples of extracted tweets

F Tokyo Baseball “Giants vs Tigersa at Tokyo Dome.
Dome game Solate’s first appearance at the Tokyo Dome.”
G Tokyo Big Sales “I’m here to help my friends move around Tokyo
Sight exhibition Big Sight for Comitiab . I’m at P41A on the
upper floor.”
H Nagoya Live concert “16:00 starts. Mr. childrenc Tour “Against All
Dome GRAVITY”
at Nagoya Dome will start soon!”
I Port of Fireworks “I noticed there are a lot of people in yukata, but
Nagoya festival then
I realized the fireworks display will start at the
Port of Nagoya.”
M Shibuya Train delay “Accident at Shibuya Station on the Yamanote
Station Line:
Broken windshield.”
a
Japanese professional baseball team
b
Sales exhibition of self-published works
c
Japanese rock band
Event Detection and Event-Relevant Tweet Extraction with Human Mobility 21

5 Conclusion and Future Work

Focusing on the correlation between topic transitions in tweets and human mobil-
ity transitions, we proposed an unsupervised method to detect events with high
crowd density (congestion) and to extract event-relevant tweets that were not
geotagged nor annotated. Our method extracts the relevant tweets by scoring
each tweet’s relevance to an event based on its topic and posting time.
We conducted evaluations using real-world multiple events (such as baseball
games and airport congestion) datasets. In our event detection experiment, we
confirmed that our method outperformed the state-of-the-art anomaly detec-
tion method regarding the number of events detected and event detection time,
regardless of the type (i.e., scheduled or unscheduled) and scale of the events. In
our event-relevant tweet extraction experiment, we confirmed that our method
can extract event-relevant tweets compared to other baseline methods. We also
showed that focusing on temporal data of human mobility transition is effective
for events during which users post tweets (e.g., festival), and focusing on the
temporal data of tweet volumes is effective for events in which people refrain
from posting tweets during the event (e.g., live concert). Based on the results we
obtained, our next step includes automatically weighting each score according to
event type and scale to improve the accuracy of event-relevant tweet extraction.
(e.g., for festival events, weight the HV -Score).
Although many GPS-based applications and privacy protection methods have
been proposed in recent years [20], further investigation is needed to determine
whether our method is effective using more sparse alternative location data, e.g.,
CDR.

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 Design of Room-Layout Estimator Using
Smart Speaker

Tomoki Joya1(B) , Shigemi Ishida2 , Yudai Mitsukude1 , and Yutaka Arakawa1

1
ISEE, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan
joya.tomoki@arakawa-lab.com, mitsukude@f.ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp,
arakawa@ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp
2
Future University Hakodate, Hokkaido 041–8655, Japan
ish@fun.ac.jp

Abstract. In this study, we propose a room-layout-based appliance con-

trol for voice user interfaces (VUIs), such as smart speakers. VUI-based
appliance control requires a control command including which device to do
what. However, we often experience an ambiguous target problem: the con-
trol target device in a control command is ambiguous because an ambigu-
ous room name and demonstrative words are frequently used to specify
the target device. To address this problem, we utilized a room layout to
estimate the control target. A user implicitly aims to control devices in a
room where they are. Therefore, we estimate the room where the user is
now based on the room layout, which is estimated on a smart speaker, to
determine the control target. In this study, we present the design of a room-
layout estimator as the first step toward room-layout-based appliance con-
trol. The experimental evaluations conducted in our 1-bedroom smart
house revealed that our room-layout estimator estimates room directions
and room types with accuracies of 0.850 and 0.714, respectively.

Keywords: Voice User Interface (VUI) · Acoustic sensing · Room

direction and type estimation

1 Introduction
Currently, smart home appliances are becoming prevalent owing to recent
advances in wireless communication and Internet of Things (IoT)-related tech-
nologies. Using smart speakers working as a voice user interface (VUI), such as
Google Home and Amazon Alexa, we can control smart home appliances using
our voice.
For VUI-based control, we need to specify which device to do what. For
example, we can turn on the lights by ordering a smart speaker to turn on the
light in the living room. In this example, we need to explicitly specify the light in
This work was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
(JSPS) KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP21K11847, JP20KK0258, and JP19KT0020 as
well as the Cooperative Research Project Program of RIEC, Tohoku University.
c ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2022
Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All Rights Reserved
T. Hara and H. Yamaguchi (Eds.): MobiQuitous 2021, LNICST 419, pp. 24–39, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94822-1_2
 Design of Room-Layout Estimator Using Smart Speaker 25

Fig. 1. Concept of room-layout-based appliance control for smart speakers

the living room because there are lights in every room. To uniquely specify the
target device, we often use room names that are configured to a smart speaker
before using the smart speaker.
However, smart speakers often experience ambiguous target problems. We
often forget to specify a room name because we implicitly aim to control devices
in the room where we are in. A target device specified by demonstrative words,
such as this light also causes a similar ambiguity.
Another cause of the ambiguous target problem is the ambiguity in the room
names. Different names are often used to specify rooms. For example, we might
attempt to turn on the light in the living room by ordering turn on the light in
the drawing room or turn on the light in the front room.
To address the ambiguous target problem, context-aware decision-making has
been proposed [2,3]. In context-aware decision-making approaches, the control
target is estimated based on the user’s context. However, user context estima-
tion requires sensors and a machine-learning model pre-trained with the user’s
previous behaviors.
In this study, we propose a new approach, room-layout-based appliance con-
trol, as shown in Fig. 1. In practical situations, ambiguous control commands
are often used, such as turn on the light. When a user makes an ambiguous com-
mand, such as turn on the light, we assume that the user aims to order turn on
the light in the room they are in. A smart speaker, therefore, estimates the room
where the user is located using a user‘s location estimator. The room layout,
which comprises room directions and types, such as a living room and bedroom,
is also estimated by a smart speaker using a room-layout estimator to determine
the room name where the control target is located.
As a first step toward this goal, in this study, we present the design of a
room-layout estimator for smart speakers. Our assumption here is that smart
speakers are equipped with a couple of microphones to estimate the user location.
Analyzing the sound source direction, the room-layout estimator first estimates
the direction of the rooms. The type of the rooms is then estimated based on
26 T. Joya et al.

the activity sound, such as faucet sound, dish sound, and TV sounds, derived
from the room direction. Although smart speakers on the market have a single
microphone, we believe that in the near future, smart speakers will be equipped
with multiple microphones to improve robustness to noise and to improve users‘
voice separation performance.
Our main contributions are as follows:
– We propose a room-layout-based appliance control method for smart speakers.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize the layout of
rooms estimated on smart speakers to determine the control target appliance.
– We present the design of a room-layout estimator for smart speakers equipped
with multiple microphones. In contrast to existing sound source localization
technologies, our approach for the room-layout estimation utilizes the room-
specific characteristics of the reflected sound to distinguish different rooms.
– We show the basic performance of our room-layout estimator through exper-
imental evaluations. We collected the home activity sound data from two
different houses. The experimental evaluations demonstrated that the room-
direction estimation accuracy and room-type estimation accuracy were 0.850
and 0.714, respectively.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes related
work on sound source localization in indoor environments. In Sect. 3, we present
the design of our room-layout estimator that utilizes multiple microphones on
a smart speaker, followed by experimental evaluations in Sect. 4. Finally, the
paper is concluded in Sect. 5.

2 Related Work
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate a room layout
using a microphone array rather than sound sources.
Sound source localization, which estimates the location of sound sources using
a microphone array, has been widely studied and includes time delay estimation,
beamforming, and subspace-based methods. Typical time delay estimators are
cross-correlation-based methods where sound sources‘ locations are estimated
by calculating the cross-correlations between microphones [7,12,15]. The beam-
forming methods are represented by delay-and-sum beamformers, which combine
sound signals on multiple microphones with phase compensation [14,16]. The
representative subspace-based method is the MUSIC method that utilizes the
orthogonality of signal and noise components in the spatial correlation matrix
of microphone array signals to estimate the location of sound sources [4,11].
Numerous studies on sound source localization have attempted to reduce the
influence of reflected sound signals in indoor environments, where the sound
localization performance degrades because of reverberation.
Suzuki et al. presented a sub-band peak hold process, which considers the
amplitude of a direct sound signal, the sound signal that first reaches the micro-
phones, and masks the reflected sound signals that reach subsequent to the direct
 Design of Room-Layout Estimator Using Smart Speaker 27

Fig. 2. Example of a sound density map with a single sound source moving in 4 rooms

sound [13]. Okamoto et al. applies a spatial averaging method to a 3-dimensional

space model by dividing a microphone array into multiple sub-arrays and aver-
aging the spatial matrices of each subarray [8].
Ishi et al. estimates the locations of multiple sound sources using a spatial
model and a ceiling-mounted microphone array comprising 16 microphones [5].
A 3-dimensional space model is utilized to estimate the influence of the reflected
sound signals. Ribeiro et al. also reported a sound source localization robust to
reflected signals relying on an actual 3-dimensional space model [10].
However, these methods require a large number of microphones, for example,
16 microphones. 3-dimensional space modeling is a novel approach, where high
computational resources or considerable human effort are required to construct
the space model. The estimation of the room layout using a resource-limited
smart speaker with a limited number of microphones is associated with numerous
unsolved problems.

3 Room-Layout Estimator for Smart Speaker

3.1 Approach

Our primary approach to estimating the room layout is to extract the reverbera-
tion features using a sound density map (a map of the sound power distribution
as a function of time for each angle). We found that the sound signals from
different rooms have different reverberation features because of the differences
in size, wall locations, and diffraction objects. The difference in reverberation
features appears as a difference in the band on the sound density map. There-
fore, we distinguish sound signals from different rooms based on the features of
bands on a sound density map using unsupervised learning algorithms.
28 T. Joya et al.

Fig. 3. Overview of room-layout estimator for smart speaker

Figure 2 shows an example of a sound density map with a single sound source,
this is, a vacuum cleaner, moving in four rooms. We installed a microphone array
in a room of a 1-bedroom smart house and collected sound signals to draw a
sound density map using the MUSIC method [11]. In Fig. 2, the moving sound
source moves from one room to the next room at the time indicated by the dashed
lines. We can confirm that the width and fluctuation of the band appearing on
the sound density map are dependent on the location of the sound source.
There are multiple sound sources in a practical environment, resulting in
multiple bands corresponding to the sound sources on a sound density map. We
first divide the sound sources and then group them by estimating the room where
the sound source was located, by unsupervised learning with features extracted
from a sound density map.

3.2 Assumptions

We assume that our method, that is, the room-layout estimator for a smart
speaker, is used in a residential environment, such as a 2-bedroom house where
multiple rooms are on the same floor and are located adjacent to each other
with doors separating them. A smart speaker with a microphone array was
installed in one of the rooms. Our goal is to estimate the room layout of rooms
connected via a door to a room where the smart speaker is installed. In these
rooms, multiple people live together. They might make living noises at different
locations simultaneously. The number of rooms next to the room where the smart
speaker is installed is given before the room-layout estimation.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
them as placed on Christ’s right and left hand: this being also the
order which the builder adopts in his Scripture history on the façade
—so that it is to be read from left to right—i. e. from Christ’s left to
Christ’s right, as He sees it. Thus, therefore, following the order of
the great statues: first in the central porch, there are six apostles on
Christ’s right hand, and six on His left. On His left hand, next Him,
Peter; then in receding order, Andrew, James, John, Matthew,
Simon; on His right hand, next Him, Paul; and in receding order,
James the Bishop, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, and Jude. These
opposite ranks of the Apostles occupy what may be called the apse
or curved bay of the porch, and form a nearly semicircular group,
clearly visible as we approach But on the sides of the porch, outside
the lines of apostles, and not clearly seen till we enter the porch are
the four greater prophets. On Christ’s left, Isaiah and Jeremiah, on
His right, Ezekiel and Daniel.
Then in front, along the whole façade—read in order from
Christ’s left to His right—come the series of the twelve minor
prophets, three to each of the four piers of the temple, beginning at
the south angle with Hosea, and ending with Malachi.
As you look full at the façade in front, the statues which fill the
minor porches are either obscured in their narrower recesses or
withdrawn behind each other so as to be unseen. And the entire
mass of the front is seen, literally, as built on the foundation of the
Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-
stone. Literally that; for the receding Porch is a deep “angulus” and
its mid-pillar is the “Head of the Corner.”
Built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, that is to
say of the Prophets who foretold Christ, and the Apostles who
declared Him. Though Moses was an Apostle of God, he is not here
—though Elijah was a Prophet of God, he is not here. The voice of
the entire building is that of the Heaven at the Transfiguration. “This
is my beloved Son, hear ye Him.”
There is yet another and a greater prophet still, who, as it seems
at first, is not here. Shall the people enter the gates of the temple,
singing “Hosanna to the Son of David;” and see no image of his
father, then?—Christ Himself declare, “I am the root and offspring of
David;” and yet the Root have no sign near it of its Earth?
Not so. David and his Son are together. David is the pedestal of
the Christ.
We will begin our examination of the Temple front, therefore with
this goodly pedestal stone. The statue of David is only two-thirds life-
size, occupying the niche in front of the pedestal. He holds his
sceptre in his right hand, the scroll in his left. King and Prophet, type
of all Divinely right doing, and right claiming, and right proclaiming,
kinghood forever.
The pedestal of which this statue forms the fronting or western
sculpture, is square, and on the two sides of it are two flowers in
vases, on its north side the lily, and on its south the rose. And the
entire monolith is one of the noblest pieces of Christian sculpture in
the world.
Above this pedestal comes a minor one, bearing in front of it a
tendril of vine, which completes the floral symbolism of the whole.
The plant which I have called a lily is not the Fleur de Lys, nor the
Madonna’s, but an ideal one with bells like the crown Imperial
(Shakespeare’s type of “lilies of all kinds”), representing the mode of
growth of the lily of the valley, which could not be sculptured so large
in its literal form without appearing monstrous, and is exactly
expressed in this tablet—as it fulfils, together with the rose and vine,
its companions, the triple saying of Christ, “I am the Rose of Sharon,
and the Lily of the Valley.” “I am the true Vine.”
On the side of the upper stone are supporters of a different
character. Supporters,—not captives nor victims; the Cockatrice and
Adder. Representing the most active evil principles of the earth, as in
their utmost malignity; still Pedestals of Christ, and even in their
deadly life, accomplishing His final will.
Both creatures are represented accurately in the mediæval
traditional form, the cockatrice half dragon, half cock; the deaf adder
laying one ear against the ground and stopping the other with her
tail.
 The first represents the infidelity of Pride. The cockatrice—king
serpent or highest serpent—saying that he is God, and will be God.
The second, the infidelity of Death. The adder (nieder or nether
snake) saying that he is mud and will be mud.
Lastly, and above all, set under the feet of the statue of Christ
Himself, are the lion and dragon; the images of Carnal sin, or Human
sin, as distinguished from the Spiritual and Intellectual sin of Pride,
by which the angels also fell.

The Bible of Amiens (Our Fathers Have Told Us), (Sunnyside,

Orpington, Kent, 1884).
 THE MOSQUE OF SANTA SOFIA.
EDMONDO DE AMICIS.

THE external aspect has nothing worthy of note. The only objects
that attract the eye are the four high white minarets that rise at the
four corners of the edifice, upon pedestals as big as houses. The
famous cupola looks small. It appears impossible that it can be the
same dome that swells into the blue air, like the head of a Titan, and
is seen from Pera, from the Bosphorus, from the Sea of Marmora,
and from the hills of Asia. It is a flattened dome, flanked by two half
domes, covered with lead, and perforated with a wreath of windows,
supported upon four walls painted in stripes of pink and white,
sustained in their turn by enormous bastions, around which rise
confusedly a number of small mean buildings, baths, schools,
mausoleums, hospitals, etc., which hide the architectural forms of
the basilica. You see nothing but a heavy, irregular mass, of a faded
colour, naked as a fortress, and not to all appearance large enough
to hold within it the immense nave of Santa Sofia’s church. Of the
ancient basilica nothing is really visible but the dome, which has lost
the silvery splendour that once made it visible, according to the
Greeks, from the summit of Olympus. All the rest is Mussulman. One
summit was built by Mahomet the Conqueror, one by Selim II., the
other two by Amurath III. Of the same Amurath are the buttresses
built at the end of the Sixteenth Century to support the walls shaken
by an earthquake, and the enormous crescent in bronze planted
upon the top of the dome, of which the gilding alone cost fifty
thousand ducats.
 THE MOSQUE OF SANTA-SOFIA.

On every side the mosque overwhelms and masks the church, of

which the head only is free, though over that also the four imperial
minarets keep watch and ward. On the eastern side there is a door
ornamented by six columns of porphyry and marble; at the southern
side another door by which you enter a court, surrounded by low,
irregular buildings, in the midst of which bubbles a fountain for
ablution, covered by an arched roof with eight columns. Looked at
from without, Santa Sofia can scarcely be distinguished from the
other mosques of Stamboul, unless by its inferior lightness and
whiteness; much less would it pass for the “greatest temple in the
world after Saint Peter’s.” ...
Between the four enormous pilasters which form a square in the
middle of the basilica, rise, to the right and left as you enter, eight
marvellous columns of green breccia from which spring the most
graceful arches, sculptured with foliage, forming an elegant portico
on either side of the nave, and sustaining at a great height two vast
galleries, which present two more ranges of columns and sculptured
arches. A third gallery which communicates with the two first, runs
along the entire side where the entrance is, and opens upon the
nave with three great arches, sustained by twin columns. Other
minor galleries, supported by porphyry columns, cross the four
temples posted at the extremity of the nave and sustain other
columns bearing tribunes. This is the basilica. The mosque is, as it
were, planted in its bosom and attached to its walls. The Mirab, or
niche which indicates the direction of Mecca, is cut in one of the
pilasters of the apse. To the right of it and high up is hung one of the
four carpets which Mahomet used in prayer. Upon the corner of the
apse, nearest the Mirab, at the top of a very steep little staircase,
flanked by two balustrades of marble sculptured with exquisite
delicacy, under an odd conical roof, between two triumphal
standards of Mahomet Second, is the pulpit where the Ratib goes up
to read the Koran, with a drawn scimetar in his hand, to indicate that
Santa Sofia is a mosque acquired by conquest. Opposite the pulpit is
the tribune of the Sultan, closed with a gilded lattice. Other pulpits or
platforms, furnished with balustrades sculptured in open work, and
ornamented with small marble columns and arabesque arches,
extend here and there along the walls, or project towards the centre
of the nave. To the right and left of the entrance, are two enormous
alabaster urns, brought from the ruins of Pergamo, by Amurath III.
Upon the pilasters, at a great height are suspended immense green
disks, with inscriptions from the Koran in letters of gold. Underneath,
attached to the walls, are large cartouches of porphyry inscribed with
the names of Allah, Mahomet, and the first four Caliphs. In the
angles formed by the four arches that sustain the cupola, may still be
seen the gigantic wings of four mosaic cherubim, whose faces are
concealed by gilded rosettes. From the vaults of the domes depend
innumerable thick silken cords, to which are attached ostrich eggs,
bronze lamps, and globes of crystal. Here and there are seen
lecterns, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and copper, with manuscript
Korans upon them. The pavement is covered with carpets and mats.
The walls are bare, whitish, yellowish, or dark grey, still ornamented
here and there with faded mosaics. The general aspect is gloomy
and sad.
The chief marvel of the mosque is the great dome. Looked at
from the nave below, it seems indeed, as Madame de Staël said of
the dome of Saint Peter’s, like an abyss suspended over one’s head.
It is immensely high, has an enormous circumference, and its depth
is only one-sixth of its diameter; which makes it appear still larger. At
its base a gallery encircles it, and above the gallery there is a row of
forty arched windows. In the top is written the sentence pronounced
by Mahomet Second, as he sat on his horse in front of the high altar
on the day of the taking of Constantinople: “Allah is the light of
heaven and of earth;” and some of the letters, which are white upon
a black ground, are nine yards long. As every one knows, this aërial
prodigy could not be constructed with the usual materials; and it was
built of pumice-stone that floats on water, and with bricks from the
island of Rhodes, five of which scarcely weigh as much as one
ordinary brick....
When you have visited the nave and the dome, you have only
begun to see Santa Sofia. For example, whoever has a shade of
historic curiosity may dedicate an hour to the columns. Here are the
spoils of all the temples in the world. The columns of green breccia
which support the two great galleries, were presented to Justinian by
the magistrates of Ephesus, and belonged to the Temple of Diana
that was burned by Erostratus. The eight porphyry columns that
stand two and two between the pilasters belonged to the Temple of
the Sun built by Aurelian at Balbek. Other columns are from the
Temple of Jove at Cizicum, from the Temple of Helios of Palmyra,
from the temples of Thebes, Athens, Rome, the Troad, the Ciclades,
and from Alexandria; and they present an infinite variety of sizes and
colours. Among the columns, the balustrades, the pedestals, and the
slabs which remain of the ancient lining of the walls, may be seen
marbles from all the ruins of the Archipelago; from Asia Minor, from
Africa and from Gaul. The marble of the Bosphorus, white spotted
with black, contrasts with the black Celtic marble veined with white;
the green marble of Laconia is reflected in the azure marble of Lybia;
the speckled porphyry of Egypt, the starred granite of Thessaly, the
red and white striped stone of Jassy, mingle their colours with the
purple of the Phrygian marble, the rose of that of Synada, the gold of
the marble of Mauritania, and the snow of the marble of Paros....
From above can be embraced at once with the eye and mind all
the life of the mosque. There are to be seen Turks on their knees,
with their foreheads touching the pavement; others erect like statues
with their hands before their faces, as if they were studying the lines
in their palms; some seated cross-legged at the base of columns, as
if they were reposing under the shadow of trees; a veiled woman on
her knees in a solitary corner; old men seated before the lecterns,
reading the Koran; an imaum hearing a group of boys reciting sacred
verses; and here and there, under the distant arcades and in the
galleries, imaum, ratib, muezzin, servants of the mosque in strange
costumes, coming and going silently as if they did not touch the
pavement. The vague harmony formed by the low, monotonous
voices of those reading or praying, those thousand strange lamps,
that clear and equal light, that deserted apse, those vast silent
galleries, that immensity, those memories, that peace, leave in the
soul an impression of mystery and grandeur which words cannot
express, nor time efface.

Constantinople (London, 1878, translation by C. Tilton).

 WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.

IT is said that the line in Heber’s “Palestine” which describes the rise
of Solomon’s temple originally ran—
“Like the green grass, the noiseless fabric grew;”
and that, at Sir Walter Scott’s suggestion, it was altered to its present
form—
“Like some tall palm, the noiseless fabric sprung.”
Whether we adopt the humbler or the grander image, the
comparison of the growth of a fine building to that of a natural
product is full of instruction. But the growth of an historical edifice like
Westminster Abbey needs a more complex figure to do justice to its
formation: a venerable oak, with gnarled and hollow trunk, and
spreading roots, and decaying bark, and twisted branches, and
green shoots; or a coral reef extending itself with constantly new
accretions, creek after creek, and islet after islet. One after another,
a fresh nucleus of life is formed, a new combination produced, a
larger ramification thrown out. In this respect Westminster Abbey
stands alone amongst the edifices of the world. There are, it may be,
some which surpass it in beauty or grandeur; there are others,
certainly, which surpass it in depth and sublimity of association; but
there is none which has been entwined by so many continuous
threads with the history of a whole nation....
 WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

If the original foundation of the Abbey can be traced back to

Sebert, the name, probably, must have been given in recollection of
the great Roman sanctuary, whence Augustine, the first missionary,
had come. And Sebert was believed to have dedicated his church to
St. Peter in the Isle of Thorns, in order to balance the compliment he
had paid to St. Paul on Ludgate Hill: a reappearance, in another
form, of the counterbalancing claims of the rights of Diana and
Apollo—the earliest stage of that rivalry which afterwards expressed
itself in the proverb of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
This thin thread of tradition, which connected the ruinous pile in
the river-island with the Roman reminiscences of Augustine, was
twisted firm and fast round the resolve of Edward; and by the
concentration of his mind on this one subject was raised the first
distinct idea of an Abbey, which the Kings of England should regard
as their peculiar treasure....
 The Abbey had been fifteen years in building. The King had
spent upon it one-tenth of the property of the kingdom. It was to be a
marvel of its kind. As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic
childish character of the King and of the age, in its architecture it
bore the stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in
English history between Saxon and Norman. By birth he was a
Saxon, but in all else he was a foreigner. Accordingly, the Church at
Westminster was a wide sweeping innovation on all that had been
seen before. “Destroying the old building,” he says in his Charter, “I
have built up a new one from the very foundation.” Its fame as “a
new style of composition” lingered in the minds of men for
generations. It was the first cruciform church in England, from which
all the rest of like shape were copied—an expression of the
increasing hold which the idea of the Crucifixion in the Tenth Century
had laid on the imagination of Europe. Its massive roof and pillars
formed a contrast with the rude rafters and beams of the common
Saxon churches. Its very size—occupying, as it did, almost the
whole area of the present building—was in itself portentous. The
deep foundations, of large square blocks of grey stone, were duly
laid. The east end was rounded into an apse. A tower rose in the
centre crowned by a cupola of wood. At the western end were
erected two smaller towers, with five large bells. The hard strong
stones were richly sculptured. The windows were filled with stained
glass. The roof was covered with lead. The cloisters, chapter-house,
refectory, dormitory, the infirmary, with its spacious chapel, if not
completed by Edward, were all begun, and finished in the next
generation on the same plan. This structure, venerable as it would
be if it had lasted to our time, has almost entirely vanished. Possibly
one vast dark arch in the southern transept—certainly the
substructures of the dormitory, with their huge pillars, “grand and
regal at the bases and capitals”—the massive low-browed passage
leading from the great cloister to Little Dean’s Yard—and some
portions of the refectory and of the infirmary chapel, remain as
specimens of the work which astonished the last age of the Anglo-
Saxon and the first age of the Norman monarchy....
In the earliest and nearly the only representation which exists of
the Confessor’s building—that in the Bayeux Tapestry—there is the
figure of a man on the roof, with one hand resting on the tower of the
Palace of Westminster, and with the other grasping the weathercock
of the Abbey. The probable intention of this figure is to indicate the
close contiguity of the two buildings. If so, it is the natural
architectural expression of a truth valuable everywhere, but
especially dear to Englishmen. The close incorporation of the Palace
and the Abbey from its earliest days is a likeness of the whole
English Constitution—a combination of things sacred and things
common—a union of the regal, legal, lay element of the nation with
its religious, clerical, ecclesiastical tendencies, such as can be found
hardly elsewhere in Christendom. The Abbey is secular because it is
sacred, and sacred because it is secular. It is secular in the common
English sense, because it is “sæcular” in the far higher French and
Latin sense: a “sæcular” edifice, a “sæcular” institution—an edifice
and an institution which has grown with the growth of ages, which
has been furrowed with the scars and cares of each succeeding
century.

A million wrinkles carve its skin;

A thousand winters snow’d upon its breast,
From cheek, and throat, and chin.

The vast political pageants of which it has been the theatre, the dust
of the most worldly laid side by side with the dust of the most saintly,
the wrangles of divines or statesmen which have disturbed its sacred
peace, the clash of arms which has pursued fugitive warriors and
princes into the shades of its sanctuary—even the traces of
Westminster boys who have played in its cloisters and inscribed their
names on its walls—belong to the story of the Abbey no less than its
venerable beauty, its solemn services, and its lofty aspirations....
The Chapel of Henry VII. is indeed well called by his name, for it
breathes of himself through every part. It is the most signal example
of the contrast between his closeness in life, and his “magnificence
in the structures he had left to posterity”—King’s College Chapel, the
Savoy, Westminster. Its very style was believed to have been a
reminiscence of his exile, being “learned in France,” by himself and
his companion Fox. His pride in its grandeur was commemorated by
the ship, vast for those times, which he built, “of equal cost with his
Chapel,” “which afterwards, in the reign of Queen Mary, sank in the
sea and vanished in a moment.”
It was to be his chantry as well as his tomb, for he was
determined not to be behind the Lancastrian princes in devotion; and
this unusual anxiety for the sake of a soul not too heavenward in its
affections expended itself in the immense apparatus of services
which he provided. Almost a second Abbey was needed to contain
the new establishment of monks, who were to sing in their stalls “as
long as the world shall endure.” Almost a second Shrine, surrounded
by its blazing tapers, and shining like gold with its glittering bronze,
was to contain his remains.
To the Virgin Mary, to whom the chapel was dedicated he had a
special devotion. Her “in all his necessities he had made his
continual refuge;” and her figure, accordingly, looks down upon his
grave from the east end, between the apostolic patrons of the Abbey,
Peter and Paul, with “the holy company of heaven—that is to say,
angels, archangels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists,
martyrs, confessors and virgins,” to “whose singular mediation and
prayers he also trusted,” including the royal saints of Britain, St.
Edward, St. Edmund, St. Oswald, St. Margaret of Scotland, who
stand, as he directed, sculptured, tier above tier, on every side of the
Chapel; some retained from the ancient Lady Chapel; the greater
part the work of his own age. Around his tomb stand his
“accustomed Avours or guardian saints” to whom “he calls and
cries”—“St. Michael, St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St.
George, St. Anthony, St. Edward, St. Vincent, St. Anne, St. Mary
Magdalene, and St. Barbara,” each with their peculiar emblems,
—“so to aid, succour, and defend him, that the ancient and ghostly
enemy, nor none other evil or damnable spirit, have no power to
invade him, nor with their wickedness to annoy him, but with holy
prayers to be intercessors to his Maker and Redeemer.” These were
the adjurations of the last mediæval King, as the Chapel was the
climax of the latest mediæval architecture. In the very urgency of the
King’s anxiety for the perpetuity of these funeral ceremonies, we
seem to discern an unconscious presentiment lest their days were
numbered.
But, although in this sense the Chapel hangs on tenaciously to
the skirts of the ancient Abbey and the ancient Church, yet that
solemn architectural pause between the two—which arrests the most
careless observer, and renders it a separate structure, a foundation
“adjoining the Abbey” rather than forming part of it—corresponds
with marvellous fidelity to the pause and break in English history of
which Henry VII.’s reign is the expression. It is the close of the
Middle Ages: the apple of Granada in its ornaments shows that the
last Crusade was over; its flowing draperies and classical attitudes
indicate that the Renaissance had already begun. It is the end of the
Wars of the Roses, combining Henry’s right of conquest with his
fragile claim of hereditary descent. On the one hand, it is the
glorification of the victory of Bosworth. The angels, at the four
corners of the tomb, held or hold the likeness of the crown which he
won on that famous day. In the stained-glass we see the same
crown hanging on the green bush in the fields of Leicestershire. On
the other hand, like the Chapel of King’s College at Cambridge, it
asserts everywhere the memory of the “holy Henry’s shade”; the Red
Rose of Lancaster appears in every pane of glass: and in every
corner is the Portcullis—the “Alters securitas,” as he termed it, with
an allusion to its own meaning, and the double safeguard of his
succession—which he derived through John of Gaunt from the
Beaufort Castle in Anjou, inherited from Blanche of Navarre by
Edmund Crouchback; whilst Edward IV. and Elizabeth of York are
commemorated by intertwining these Lancastrian symbols with the
Greyhound of Cecilia Neville, wife of Richard, Duke of York, with the
Rose in the Sun, which scattered the mists at Barnet, and the Falcon
on the Fetterlock, by which the first Duke of York expressed to his
descendants that “he was locked up from the hope of the kingdom,
but advising them to be quiet and silent, as God knoweth what may
come to pass.”
It is also the revival of the ancient, Celtic, British element in the
English monarchy, after centuries of eclipse. It is a strange and
striking thought, as we mount the steps of Henry VII.’s Chapel, that
we enter there a mausoleum of princes, whose boast it was to be
descended, not from the Confessor or the Conqueror, but from
Arthur and Llewellyn; and that round about the tomb, side by side
with the emblems of the great English Houses, is to be seen the Red
Dragon of the last British king, Cadwallader—“the dragon of the
great Pendragonship” of Wales, thrust forward by the Tudor king in
every direction, to supplant the hated White Boar of his departed
enemy—the fulfilment, in another sense than the old Welsh bards
had dreamt, of their prediction that the progeny of Cadwallader
should reign again....
We have seen how, by a gradual but certain instinct, the main
groups have formed themselves round particular centres of death:
how the Kings ranged themselves round the Confessor; how the
Prince and Courtiers clung to the skirts of Kings; how out of the
graves of the Courtiers were developed the graves of the Heroes;
how Chatham became the centre of the Statesmen, Chaucer of the
Poets, Purcell of the Musicians, Casaubon of the Scholars, Newton
of the Men of Science: how, even in the exceptional details, natural
affinities may be traced; how Addison was buried apart from his
brethren in letters, in the royal shades of Henry VII.’s Chapel,
because he clung to the vault of his own loved Montague; how
Ussher lay beside his earliest instructor, Sir James Fullerton, and
Garrick at the foot of Shakespeare, and Spelman opposite his
revered Camden, and South close to his master Busby, and
Stephenson to his fellow-craftsman Telford, and Grattan to his hero
Fox, and Macaulay beneath the statue of his favourite Addison.
These special attractions towards particular graves and
monuments may interfere with the general uniformity of the Abbey,
but they make us feel that it is not a mere dead museum, that its cold
stones are warmed with the life-blood of human affections and
personal partiality. It is said that the celebrated French sculptor of the
monument of Peter the Great at St. Petersburg, after showing its
superiority in detail to the famous equestrian statue of Marcus
Aurelius at Rome, ended by the candid avowal, “Et cependant cette
mauvaise bête est vivante, et la mienne est morte.” Perhaps we may
be allowed to reverse the saying, and when we contrast the
irregularities of Westminster Abbey with the uniform congruity of
Salisbury or the Valhalla, may reflect, “Cette belle bête est morte,
mais la mienne est vivante.”

Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London, 1866).

 THE PARTHENON.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

FROM whatever point the plain of Athens with its semicircle of

greater and lesser hills may be surveyed, it always presents a
picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The Acropolis is the centre
of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with its crown of temples;
and the sea, surmounted by the long low hills of the Morea, is the
boundary to which the eye is irresistibly led. Mountains and islands
and plain alike are made of limestone, hardening here and there into
marble, broken into delicate and varied forms, and sprinkled with a
vegetation of low shrubs and brushwood so sparse and slight that
the naked rock in every direction meets the light. This rock is grey
and colourless; viewed in the twilight of a misty day, it shows the dull,
tame uniformity of bone. Without the sun it is asleep and sorrowful.
But by reason of this very deadness, the limestone of Athenian
landscape is always ready to take the colours of the air and sun. In
noonday it smiles with silvery lustre, fold upon fold of the indented
hills and islands melting from the brightness of the sea into the
untempered brilliance of the sky. At dawn and sunset the same rocks
array themselves with a celestial robe of rainbow-woven hues:
islands, sea, and mountains, far and near, burn with saffron, violet,
and rose, with the tints of beryl and topaz, sapphire and almandine
and amethyst, each in due order and at proper distances. The fabled
dolphin in its death could not have showed a more brilliant
succession of splendours waning into splendours through the whole
chord of prismatic colours. This sensitiveness of the Attic limestone
to every modification of the sky’s light gives a peculiar spirituality to
the landscape....
 THE PARTHENON.

Seen from a distance, the Acropolis presents nearly the same

appearance as it offered to Spartan guardsmen when they paced the
ramparts of Deceleia. Nature around is unaltered. Except that more
villages, enclosed with olive-groves and vineyards, were sprinkled
over those bare hills in classic days, no essential change in the
landscape has taken place, no transformation, for example, of equal
magnitude with that which converted the Campagna of Rome from a
plain of cities to a poisonous solitude. All through the centuries which
divide us from the age of Hadrian—centuries unfilled, as far as
Athens is concerned, with memorable deeds or national activity—the
Acropolis has stood uncovered to the sun. The tones of the marble
of Pentelicus have daily grown more golden; decay has here and
there invaded frieze and capital; war too has done its work,
shattering the Parthenon in 1687 by the explosion of a powder-
magazine, and the Propylæa in 1656 by a similar accident, and
seaming the colonnades that still remain with cannon-balls in 1827.
Yet in spite of time and violence the Acropolis survives, a miracle of
beauty: like an everlasting flower, through all that lapse of years it
has spread its coronal of marbles to the air, unheeded. And now,
more than ever, its temples seem to be incorporate with the rock
they crown. The slabs of column and basement have grown together
by long pressure or molecular adhesion into a coherent whole. Nor
have weeds or creeping ivy invaded the glittering fragments that
strew the sacred hill. The sun’s kiss alone has caused a change from
white to amber-hued or russet. Meanwhile, the exquisite adaptation
of Greek building to Greek landscape has been enhanced rather
than impaired by that “unimaginable touch of time,” which has
broken the regularity of outline, softened the chisel-work of the
sculptor, and confounded the painter’s fretwork in one tint of glowing
gold. The Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Propylæa have
become one with the hill on which they cluster, as needful to the
scenery around them as the everlasting mountains, as sympathetic
as the rest of nature to the successions of morning and evening,
which waken them to passionate life by the magic touch of colour....
In like manner, when moonlight, falling aslant upon the
Propylæa, restores the marble masonry to its original whiteness, and
the shattered heaps of ruined colonnades are veiled in shadow, and
every form seems larger, grander, and more perfect than by day, it is
well to sit on the lowest steps, and looking upwards, to remember
what processions passed along this way bearing the sacred peplus
to Athene. The Panathenaic pomp, which Pheidias and his pupils
carved upon the friezes of the Parthenon, took place once in five
years, on one of the last days of July. All the citizens joined in the
honour paid to their patroness. Old men bearing olive branches,
young men clothed in bronze, chapleted youths singing the praise of
Pallas in prosodial hymns, maidens carrying holy vessels, aliens
bending beneath the weight of urns, servants of the temple leading
oxen crowned with fillets, troops of horsemen reining in impetuous
steeds: all these pass before us in the frieze of Pheidias. But to our
imagination must be left what he has refrained from sculpturing, the
chariot formed like a ship, in which the most illustrious nobles of
Athens sat, splendidly arrayed, beneath the crocus-coloured curtain
or peplus outspread upon a mast. Some concealed machinery
caused this car to move; but whether it passed through the
Propylæa, and entered the Acropolis, admits of doubt. It is, however,
certain that the procession which ascended those steep slabs, and
before whom the vast gates of the Propylæa swang open with the
clangour of resounding bronze, included not only the citizens of
Athens and their attendant aliens, but also troops of cavalry and
chariots; for the mark of chariot-wheels can still be traced upon the
rock. The ascent is so abrupt that this multitude moved but slowly.
Splendid indeed, beyond any pomp of modern ceremonial, must
have been the spectacle of the well-ordered procession, advancing
through those giant colonnades to the sound of flutes and solemn
chants—the shrill clear voices of boys in antiphonal chorus rising
above the confused murmurs of such a crowd, the chafing of horses’
hoofs upon the stone, and the lowing of bewildered oxen. To realise
by fancy the many-coloured radiance of the temples, and the rich
dresses of the votaries illuminated by that sharp light of a Greek sun,
which defines outline and shadow and gives value to the faintest
hue, would be impossible. All we can know for positive about the
chromatic decoration of the Greeks is, that whiteness artificially
subdued to the tone of ivory prevailed throughout the stonework of
the buildings, while blue and red and green in distinct, yet interwoven
patterns, added richness to the fretwork and the sculpture of
pediment and frieze. The sacramental robes of the worshippers
accorded doubtless with this harmony, wherein colour was
subordinate to light, and light was toned to softness.
Musing thus upon the staircase of the Propylæa, we may say
with truth that all our modern art is but child’s play to that of the
Greeks. Very soul-subduing is the gloom of a cathedral like the
Milanese Duomo, when the incense rises in blue clouds athwart the
bands of sunlight falling from the dome, and the crying of choirs
upborne on the wings of organ music fills the whole vast space with
a mystery of melody. Yet such ceremonial pomps as this are but as
dreams and shapes of visions, when compared with the clearly
defined splendours of a Greek procession through marble peristyles
in open air beneath the sun and sky. That spectacle combined the
harmonies of perfect human forms in movement with the divine