Happy New Year 2011

Social Networking Meets Ambient Intelligence !!

Sharing small snippets of information about your daily life is a key feature of the online social networking revolution. Soon status updates and other social information could be generated automatically.

A team of European researchers are working on merging the instant sharing of social information, popularised by networking and messaging platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, with emerging ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create awareness of users' whereabouts and activities. Combined, the two technologies promise to provide pervasive awareness, a powerful new way to stay in touch with friends and relatives, whether they live down the street or on the other side of the globe.

"The theory we developed as the basis for our work is that social connections between people are enhanced by both the number and the quality of the interactions between them. Pervasive awareness systems can support and improve this social communication," explains Achilles Kameas, a senior researcher at the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (raCTI) of Patras, Greece.

Kameas coordinated the EU-funded ASTRA project, which brought together researchers from multiple disciplines, including psychology, interaction design, knowledge engineering and computer science, to take social networking to the next level.

In touch with friends and family, automatically?

Users of a social networking platform based on the ASTRA approach, for example, would rarely have to post status updates manually to let their family know what they are doing or where they are. Surrounded by smart objects and sensors in their home or office, the system continually updates their status information, automatically telling friends that they are unavailable to receive a phone call while they are busy cooking or that they do not want to be disturbed during a business meeting.

"Not only is this information generated automatically, depending on the criteria set by each user, but it does not have to be displayed on a computer screen or in any other distracting way," Kameas explains. "In a smart home or office environment the system could let users know if someone is available for a phone call or not simply by changing the colour of the frame of a photo of them."

The researchers developed their approach based on the so-called focus-nimbus model to determine what information is shared and what is received by different people in a social network. In this context, a person's nimbus consists of the type, amount and detail of information they want to share with others, while their focus contains the type and amount of information they choose to receive from others, including their reaction to the person's nimbus.

The ASTRA software architecture allows both criteria to be defined through a rule-based system that governs what information is shared, in what way and with whom. A husband and wife, for example, may each want to know when the other gets home, but a mother may only want to be informed when her daughter returns, not the reverse.

User-defined applications

Different applications, defined by each user or community of users, allow for a wide variety of scenarios, from simple event alerts, to supporting more complex, community-wide situations. According to Kameas, creating such apps is a relatively straightforward process, particularly for tech-savvy young people who are accustomed to modifying and adding features to their MySpace or Facebook pages. However, the researchers are currently working on a new interface to make the process even easier.

Consumer electronics manufacturer Phillips and mobile operator Telenor have conducted trials of the ASTRA technology, with Phillips testing it in its prototype HomeLab smart home.

Source: Social Networking Meets Ambient Intelligence

Social Networking Extends Mobile Battery Life !!

A new approach to social networking for mobile devices, such as tablet PCs and smart phones could improve the user experience and boost battery life by up to 70% by exploiting shared data between users in the same location. Details are reported this month in the International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems.

Social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter can now all be accessed via mobile devices and offer location-based services, these are explicit networks. But there is a second kind of network that can be created by virtue of the users' context (e.g. location) and preferences (e.g. favourite multimedia content), an implicit network that could hook together users who are physically close to each other and share similar interests.

Now, Vedran Podobnik and colleagues at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, have developed the software, or middleware, that could sit between telecommunications provider and users and allow a richer and faster experience for users as well as reducing the bandwidth burden on providers and even save mobile battery life substantially. The system works through serendipitous cooperation, via more energy-efficient Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, between users close to each other in an urban environment. The team suggests, based on simulation of such peer-shared activity, that users could boost battery life by almost three quarters.

"Our MAgNet middleware enables creation by the telecommunications company of an overlay network (i.e. social network) on top of the network of users physically situated in a mobile network environment and using mobile devices," explains Podobnik. "The system identifies mobile users near each other who are interested in the same multimedia content," he adds. "Each mobile user would download only a part of the requested content from the mobile network and then share it with other users in their locale via an ad hoc Bluetooth or Wi-Fi network." It is peer-to-peer downloading but on a local scale for the mutual benefit of users and providers.

Read More: Social Networking Extends Mobile Battery Life

Need for Transparency on the Web !!

The need for more transparency in Web-based information systems has been highlighted by an academic at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science.

In a paper entitled "The Foundations for Provenance on the Web", published in the journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science, Professor Luc Moreau points out that due to the complex flows of information on the Web, it is not always clear where information originates from.

"This is a challenge since we want to be able to establish the exact source of information, we want to decide whether information has been altered, and by whom, we want to corroborate and possibly reproduce such information, and ultimately we want to decide whether the information comes from a trustworthy source," said Professor Moreau.

According to Professor Moreau, the solution lies in 'provenance', a term used in diverse areas such as art, archaeology and palaeontology, which describes the history of an object since its creation. Its main focus is to establish that the object has not been forged or altered, and the same can be done with computer-generated data.

"Understanding where data comes from will enable users to decide if it's trustworthy. This will also lead to a new generation of services over the Web, capable of producing trusted information," Professor Moreau added.

In his paper, Professor Moreau reviews several approaches that adopt provenance, allowing their actions and information flows to be audited, and their compliance or violation to rules and policies to be determined. These strong capabilities -- information transparency, auditing capabilities and compliance detection -- provide users with the means to decide whether they can trust systems and information.

Read More: Need for Transparency on the Web