Analyzing Human Behavior through Screen Data

Anjie chats with Dr. Nilam Ram. Nilam is a Professor of Communications & Psychology at Stanford University, and he studies how short-term changes develop across the life span and how longitudinal study designs contribute to the generation of new knowledge. Nilam is developing a variety of study paradigms that use recent developments in data science and the intensive data streams arriving from social media, mobile sensors, and smartphones to study behavioral change at multiple time scales. In this episode, we take a look at one of the paradigms that he has been working on: the Human Screenome Project, an ambitious project that has participants’ phone screens captured every five seconds for over a year as a way to record their specific ways of interacting with phones. Nilam shares how his thinking around generalizability has evolved over the course of the project.

Nilam’s paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00273171.2023.2229305

Nilam’s lab website: https://thechangelab.stanford.edu

Anjie’s: website: anjiecao.github.io

Anjie’s Twitter @anjie_cao

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