A Mobile Phone based reliable interaction tool for
intention-based virtual groups of strangers
- A case of taxi sharing application
Sangwon Choi, Sangyong Gil
Computer Science Department, KAIST
Daejeon, Korea
{sangwonchoi7, i.m.cliet}@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Communication is a major concern in the global world we
are living, especially in sharing activities among strangers
who speak different languages or have different cultures.
These differences engender trust issues because we can’t
conceive a safe environment where benefits are made by
people who don’t know each other. Giving the possibility to
users to provide their personal information is one approach
to resolve this issue. But, this solution affects people’s
privacy and safety because of the difficulty to measure
loyalty and credibility of individuals.
This area hasn’t been well investigated yet. In fact, the
complexity of human behaviors sets a solid barrier facing
research works related to collaboration between people
from different communities. Nevertheless, our surveys
attest that communication can build trust and confidence
among strangers after a reasonable amount of time. In this
paper, we present the design and implementation of a novel
reliable interaction tool for making real connection among
strangers within intention based virtual groups to make
benefits by sharing activities.
Author Keywords
Interaction tool, interaction with strangers, location-based
social network, privacy, trust, communication
1. INTRODUCTION
The smartphone market has taken off with the introduction
of high-tech phones with extensive mobile capabilities,
services like Location Based Service (LBS) and Social
Network Services (SNS) gained popularity within users
because they allow dynamic interactions between users
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Zakaria Alkabbab
Telecommunications Department, INSA Lyon
Lyon, France
zakaria.alkabbab@gmail.com
who, most of the time, know each other or have the same
interest. Specifically, applications such as Foursquare [5]
and WhosHere [12] implement those services. The present
work expands these applications into a more profitable field
(activity sharing) in a view to make savings. For instance, a
taxi sharing application allows its users to save money by
sharing a ride. This system is different from current SNS
applications because users don’t have to meet again. They
meet only for the purpose of making benefits. However,
several problems arise when strangers have to meet
sometimes because they are just shy or they don’t feel safe
and comfortable with people they don’t know. They
actually want to interact before meeting strangers.
Moreover, they don’t like to share their personal
information so there is a tradeoff between privacy and
making benefits by sharing activities with strangers. We
conducted numerous surveys that led us to consider the
operation time which consists of making homogenous
groups and efficiently manages the discussion to reach an
agreement quickly. This paper introduces the design and
implementation of a taxi sharing application which covers
the issues discussed above and emphasizes the usefulness of
an interaction tool to help users feel safe and comfortable to
collaborate. This application is economical in many aspects
because it allows its users to save money, it is also
environmentally friendly because users share one car so
they save energy and pollute less. We assume that, by
providing simple interaction method, real connection can be
made without personal information (phone number, sex,
religion…)
This paper is organized as follows. We discuss related
works in Section 2. In Section 3, we introduce the results of
the survey we conducted before implementing the taxi
sharing system. Results of the experiment are then analyzed
in Section 4. Followed by a description of the main
functions of the application and a graph summarizing its
overall architecture as well as its implementation in Section
5. Then, we conduct a small discussion in Section 6 before
concluding the paper in Section 8.
2. RELATED WORK
Location-based social networks let users see where their
friends are, search location-tagged content within their
social graph, and meet nearby friends [1]. Based on location
information, Nan Li and Guanling Chen [1] found four
different types of human moving patterns. Moreover,
Foursquare [5] is a representative Location-based social
network application. Similarly, numerous SNS sites merge
their property with location such as Facebook [4] – Place or
twitter [11]. Our work is different because those
applications are focusing on people who know each other.
On the other hand, WhosHere [12] finds chatting candidates
based on users location information. This is similar to
handling strangers who are located in close area, but
chatting does not require real meeting. In addition, the
situation is not dynamic in this case. By reviewing current
Location-based SNS, we found that it doesn’t address
connections between strangers, so we can consider our
work as a contribution to this service.
Further, Ride sharing and taxi sharing systems have been
developed only on web environment [13] and mobile phone
environment [9]. In contrast we these works, we are
focusing more on building a safe environment that will
allow strangers to meet and collaborate.
3. SURVEYS
To verify issues on making real group from intention-based
virtual group, we applied a taxi sharing system. In the
online-taxi-sharing system, users request to share a taxi and
find an online group that has same interest (want to share
taxi, located at close area, and have same destination). Then,
they have to meet in a certain place.
To build this system, we have composed 5 interrogations
we want to investigate. Therefore, we conducted two off-
line questionnaires to understand users’ activity when
meeting strangers in front of campus cafeteria.
The first questionnaire involves Q1 and Q2. It was
completed by 20 people. All participants are KAIST
university students (male: 11, female: 9, average age: 20.9)
The second questionnaire includes Q3, Q4, and Q5. This
questionnaire was completed by 45 people (male: 27,
female: 18, average age: 22.2). Same as the first
questionnaire; all participants are KAIST students.
Q1: Does it interest you to meet strangers to save
money or make benefits by sharing an activity with
them?
As in social commerce, gathering friends and making a
group to get discounts is common because people do not
have to meet strangers. However, if they have to make a
virtual group, wait for other members, then meet face-to-
face, and take a taxi with the group members. Thus, our aim
is to know whether people are eager to share a taxi or not
with strangers.
To answer this question, we asked “when you take a taxi,
imagine there is somebody with whom you can share taxi.
Are you going to share the taxi with him or her?”. The
results show that 90% (18 people) of participants like to
share taxi with strangers. Therefore, we can admit that most
university students want to make groups with strangers if
there is an advantage. Though, we cannot be certain that
this will be generalized to all people because all participants
in this survey are university students. At least, this survey
demonstrates that there are groups who are very motivated
to meet strangers in order to save money. This experience
can also give them the opportunity to make new friends.
Further, half of the participants want to use the taxi-sharing
application even if only half of battery capacity is left.
Number
of users
Manually insert the location using map or text 5
Use from previous destination database 9
Automatically finds the users 6
Table 1: User preference method of making virtual group
Q2: What kind of methods you want to use to make a
virtual group who shares the same interest as you by
mean of a mobile phone application?
To make real connection from intention-based virtual group
among strangers, there must be a virtual group at first. And
there are lots of ways to make a virtual group which has the
same intention or interest when using a mobile phone
application. Indeed, the problem is more complicated in
mobile devices because people need a simple way to make
a group such a touching or pushing a button once.
We asked the question “when you enter the destination to
make a taxi sharing group, which method is better for you?”
At first, we thought people would like automatic group
recommendation system. But surprisingly, table 1 shows
that manual insertion is preferred than the automatic way.
Actually, predicting user’s next location is not a simple task.
Moreover, GPS data is not that accurate to find a specific
area. So, we decided to develop a manually well-defined
graphical interface so that people can use our system just by
touching once.
Q3: How far would you go to make a real group?
For a taxi sharing system, there is a distance limitation that
we use to make groups because group members should
meet in a nearby place. At the same time, people might be
ready to wait a longer time or walk a longer distance to
meet the other members of the same group if there is more
benefit. So we asked two questions; “Imagine you are going
to take a taxi from KAIST to Dunsan (costs about 5,000
KRW). If there are other people with whom you can share with strangers. At the same time, the other members must
the taxi, how far would you walk to meet them?”, and be trustworthy so any kind of interaction will be inevitable
“Imagine you are going to take a taxi from KAIST to to improve the credibility of the system.
Daejeon station (costs about 10,000 KRW). If there are
other people with whom you can share the taxi, how far Q5: How much personal information would you like to
would you walk to meet them?” share?
Through five questions we got the following result; before
meeting strangers, people want to communicate and interact
with them within a virtual group by talking or text-
Duration 5,000 KRW 10,000 KRW messaging. Moreover, they don’t like the idea of sharing
Less than 1 min 7 12 their personal information because it’s private. Therefore
there is a trade-off between privacy and trust. The more
Less than 3 min 8 10 they interact, the better they trust.
Less than 5 min 16 16
INTERACTION TOOL
Less than 10 min 8 3 According to our surveys, we observe that 1) taxi sharing
Less than 20 min 6 4 requires making real groups, but it does not require a lot of
intimacy among group members because they do not have
Table 2: Number of people who will use the taxi sharing to meet again. 2) There must be a minimal credibility to
system according to the amount of money saving/distance become a group member.
of the ride
Based on this observation, we propose an interaction tool
that users can communicate and interact to reach an
The only difference is how much the user can save money.
agreement. When a virtual group is composed, users can
If two people share a taxi, they can just save 2,500 ~ 5000
see where the other members are. Then, members can
KRWs. Although, table 2 shows that most people are
choose place where they want to meet. Those responses will
willing to go to a place five minutes away, this cannot be an
be notified to other members and users can feel safe when
absolute threshold. However, we can infer that people can
they are interacting with each other. Even with this minimal
move to another place to meet strangers.
interaction, we assume that it will be enough to share a taxi
together. Also, position information can be delivered more
correctly by our interaction tool than by voice call or text
How to decide the place to # of people message.
meet?
Public place like taxi stop by 12
system
Mid-place among users by 15
system
Negotiation between users 18
If you are Phone 7
going to
Skype 8
negotiate,
which method SMS 16
is better? Figure 1: interaction tool layout for taxi sharing system,
Messenger 8
location that users want to meet is represented to all group
Table 3: Preference of determining meeting place members when a user touches (chooses) a location

Q4: How to decide the place where you have to meet?
After virtual group is made, people decide the place where
they will meet. Table 3 shows the preference of determining
meeting place. Meeting place can be determined by the
system itself or by negotiation. More than half participants
like that the system suggest a meeting place and the rest of
them prefer text messaging (SMS and messenger) to voice
message when negotiation is required. That could be
explained by the fact that people are reluctant to interact
4. EXPERIMENT
To verify that our interaction tool works as we expected, we
set the experiment with 3 conditions in table 4.
Problem statement
In the case of making real-connection from the intention-
based virtual group among strangers in by mean of a mobile
phone application, we evaluate the trade-off between users’
privacy and trust through our survey results. Likewise, we
mentioned that people don’t want to share their context

Description
Case 1 Recommended meeting place by system
No personal information
Case 2 Recommended meeting place by system
Phone number is provided
Our Recommended meeting place by system
Interaction Users can dynamically update their
Tool location
Table 4: Description of each condition
easily in a mobile environment. They need some an
intuitive structured interface only (5W1H) [6], as well as
exact and reliable information.
Hypothesis
By providing our interaction tool, structured information
will be made easily, and people can make real-connection
without exchanging their personal information.
Objective
We want to show that real connection can be made without
any personal information using the interaction tool we
proposed.
Task
We randomly choose three subjects who do not know each
other and give them a recommendation meeting place. We
set 10 minutes (600 seconds) as a threshold of task success.
To do balanced evaluation, we set average distance from
each subject to less than 5 minutes walking. The reason we
chose three participants is because we can observe the case
of two people at the same time. Also, three users are
enough to check the multiple user case.
We used two evaluation metrics. The first one is connection
rate which shows the number of times where participants
meet. The other metric is task completion time which
means elapsed time to meet each other. To get correct
completion time, we check the time at the meeting place,
connect participants through the school web page and
explain tasks in advance the day of the experiment. After all
the tasks are over, we take comments from the participants.
Apparatus
In this experiment, we used Android 2.1 platform [1] with
various Android phones (Motorola Motoloy, Samsung
GalaxyS and HTC Desire). For the database, we use a
MySQL server with php programming and C# ADO.NET
[7] for database execution.
And we used MQTT-based push notification [10] to notify
each user if his group was made or not.
Implementation details for the experiment environment will
be explained in the implementation section.
Participants
Our participants are six university students who do not
know each other (average age: 24.8, all male). Table 4
shows the condition of the experimentation. Each subject
participated in the task six times and executed tasks with
counter-valancing. Four samples are gathered from the
experiment for each condition.
RESULT
Figure 2 shows the average task completion time of each
condition (our interaction tool: 502.5 sec, condition 1:
496.8 sec, and condition 2: 481.5 sec) with no significant
difference between conditions (t > 0.05). Connection rate
gives the same result (75%, 75% and 75%) with a 10
minutes threshold. Because of the small sample size, we
couldn’t see any statistical significance. But the result can
change by increasing samples and modifying experiment
setting.
Comments are as follows: “It was good to see the others
suggestion and tell my opinion just clicking”, “I would
always go to the place which is determined by system”,
“Knowing others’ phone number makes me confident”, “I
like the interaction tool. This is such a fun game”, “I was
late because I had something to do, and the system should
be a little bit faster”.
Experiment did show the result that we have expected
because most participants felt that they perform tasks based
on the system request in an easy and efficient way.
However, the situation of experimentation is different from
that of taxi sharing case. Also, all participants are university
students so they care less about credibility, and they are not
real strangers.
Figure 2 Task completion time (seconds)
5. IMPLEMENTATION
To verify that our taxi sharing system works well, we
implemented a real taxi sharing application in Android
platform. Figure 3 shows the overview of our system. The
application is based on a refined touch-screen graphical
interface. It allows the user to choose his destination. Then
a request is generated and sent to a MySQL server. This last
manages the database that contains two tables (requests and
groups). The server sends back the results to the application
in the user’s side. It includes two modules; request handler
and group checker.
Figure 3 Architecture of taxi sharing system
Message handler
Message handler is a operating module in the user’s side.
When users send a request to the taxi-sharing system, the
push-register automatically registers the device at the server
using MQTT protocol [8]. At the same time, request
manager sends the request to the MySQL server in the
following format:
– (current GPS data, destination GPS data, time, number of
people, ttl)
Number of people represents the number of people who
represent one request and ttl means the maximum waiting
time of each user.
Group checker
Group Checker managers group updates, group status and
notifies group members. It calls request handler periodically.
We set cycle duration as one second in our experiment.
This value can be decreased, but one second does not affect
the efficiency of the system. After that Group checker
retrieves the group table, it calls push notification if there is
a change of any record. For example, if there is a group
with two people at first and one person is added to the
group. Then, the group checker notifies again all the
members of the group.
Request handler
This php function runs continuously on the server seeking
groups, it follows a certain process. First, the requests
received by the server are stored in a MySQL database.
Each request contains a user ID, current and destination
geographical coordinates, the number of passengers and the
amount of time the user can wait to get a result. The request
handler browses the requests table and finds groups of users
whose current and destination coordinates belong to the
same area. For specifically, the difference between their
coordinates doesn’t exceed a certain distance
($MAX_DIST). Further, group members of the group
formed, at the end of each iteration, are notified so that they
can communicate with each other and decide the meeting
place, otherwise the smartphone application suggests a
meeting place (nearest public place) to the members.
Finally, the request handler removes from the database the
requests of the users for whom it found a group. It also
removes expired requests.
User privacy consideration
No personal information is sent to the backend server. The
sensing scripts for our platform capture only hashed
identifiers, and data is secured and anonymized before
aggregate analysis.
Energy efficiency
The GPS sensor used in the taxi sharing application is not
sampled periodically; it’s triggered only when the user
sends a request to the server.
6. DISCUSSION
This research is designed to examine trust building among
strangers with anonymous exchanges. We define an
anonymous exchange as one in which individuals interact
with each and do not know the identity of their partners. We
disentangle trusting and trustworthiness behaviors using an
implementation of a novel approach to interaction among
strangers. Our surveys shows that people are not
trustworthy when they are uncertain about others’ trusting
intentions. Interestingly, even with a total lack of formal
mechanisms, and little (if any) informal sanctions due to the
minimum scope of social relations, we find evidence of
trusting behavior.
7. FUTURE WORK
We observe that communication is a marvelous mean that
allows users to build trust before sharing an activity.
Therefore more efforts have to made to develop additional
features to accelerate the communication process. Future
works may also address various applications based on the
same concept introduced in this paper. For instance, we can
conceive an application that finds group members to buy
group tickets for theatre, concerts or soccer game…
because group ticket prices are often cheaper. Larger scale
surveys also have to be conducted to better study
interactions among strangers.
8. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we discuss the challenges of building trust
and finding agreement among strangers who want to make
benefits by sharing activities. In addition, we had to cope
with trust and privacy issues. We found that an interaction 3. Bhuiyan, T., Xu, Y., Jøsang, A. Integrating Trust with
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for intention based virtual groups. Our experiment design 4. Facebook
consists of comparing connection rate between two
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their personal information so that his group members can 5. Foursquare
know about him before meeting him. In the second http://foursquare.com
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mention that the surveys are made in South Korea and 7. MySQL connectors in C#
human interactions are very dependent to culture, therefore http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/
results may differ in other communities. Still, we believe
8. MQTT Protocol
our work came up with a major contribution to human
communication area and can serve as a baseline framework http://www-
for more general applications such those discussed in future 01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=171&uid=swg240
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sustainable ride-sharing & socialization. CHI 2007, 2079-
We thank Professor Junehwa Song for supporting this 2084
research work and providing helpful comments. We are
10.Push notification for Android
also grateful to You Chongkouk for his collaboration and
idea. http://tokudu.com/2010/how-to-implement-push-
notifications-for-android/
Some of the references cited in this paper are included for
illustrative purposes only. 11. Twitter
http://twitter.com/
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