Sunday, August 30, 2009

Second day of IEEE SocialCom conference

Yesterday, after the conference, there was a very great reception (thanks organizers!) at the Renaissance hotel where I was able to network with important people and eat great food! Today is the second day of the conference with lots of parallel sessions and workshops, so it's going to be a busy day. There is a workshop on Mobile Phones sensing which I'm attending. The first is an invited talk on Social Computing with Mobile Phones and Sensors and the talk is about creating social computing applications using sensory data from the mobile phone, for example, one application for determining where to put recycling bins based on pictures, tagging, geocoding and location traces. Another application is for health and wellness, one example is AndWellness.

The first paper in this workshop is on Touch Me Wear, which is about physical contact with social networks presented by Aaron Beach. They created a touch me shirt where if you hug people, it will show on Facebook who are the people you have hugged. It uses Bluetooth to upload the hug to Facebook through a contact access point. This group is the author of the paper WhozThat. There are lots of mobile social networking companies like BrightKite that can find out who are around you and what are you doing through activity inference. This is a very good example of merging actual physical interaction with social interaction and bringing it to virtual communities like Facebook.

No comments: