Happy New Year and reflections on 2011

Hello all! Well, it's been a while since I wrote on my blog as I really don't use my blog anymore since my writing behaviour is to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Sina Weibo in China. As I sit here in the office at Nokia Research Center in Beijing on the last day of 2011, I reflect on how it has been a great year in 2011 for me, I have made many accomplishments and have surpassed those from 2010. Research wise, I have led many research trials with the Nokia Find & Connect project, most notably public are SXSW 2011, Tsinghua Centennary and UbiComp conference. For those, who do not know about Nokia Find & Connect, it is a research project that is aimed to help to find people and resources in an office or public event such as a conference and connect with them to social network, communicate and add as contact. It is meant to deliver an integrated social experience on your mobile providing location, context and social connections. It is part of this vision of mobile social networking, where the mobile becomes an integrated part of your lifestyle and people are connected to you through the mobile, the mobile records the social interactions and can infer actual real social networks that can be synchronized with online social networks. Nokia Find & Connect was first presented to a lucky set of Nokia bloggers at SXSW 2011 in Austin, Texas. Coverage of this can be found here, and I was interviewed by the Nokia NSeries blog team.

The second trial of Nokia Find & Connect was at the Tsinghua University Centennary celebrating 100 years at Tsinghua University, where visitors were able to use the software to find their location on the Tsinghua campus and meet with new people, adding them to their social network. This was especially good for those alumni who can connect after many years.

We also had a visualization on a big display.

Our third and most successful Nokia Find & Connect trial to date was at UbiComp 2011 conference which is a prestigious research conference on ubiquitous computing which was held in Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Over 200 attendees used our Nokia Find & Connect system where we provided a web client and attendees had RFID badges for the positioning. With the application, you could find out where people were in the session room, see their research interests, and then add them as contacts. We also recommended contacts for them to add to their social network. Many attendees enjoyed using the service and it provided easy use of contact management. Here I am showing a new attendee how to use Nokia Find & Connect:

We also helped a Chinese artist and professor using Nokia Find & Connect for a augmented reality game called 798 Talk Show being showcased in the AV@AR exhibition at the Chinese Millennium Monument in Beijing until January 3, 2012. You can use your phone in the exhibit and choose a character to play a game which you control on a big display at the exhibit, really cool!

I also published a bunch of papers and just recently got accepted to a journal, so I am very grateful and feel blessed for such a wonderful and productive year. You can see the updated list on my web site. As well, besides work, my wife and I have 7 baby rabbits that were born in December!

I wish you all a very Happy New Year!