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.

Session on Social Computing - IEEE SocialCom'09

I'm now in the session on Social Computing, one of the sessions in IEEE SocialCom conference. The first talk that I attended was about Guangxi on the Chinese Web where the presenter showed work that they did in doing an empirical study of Guangxi web sites using PageRank, compared to the general web and structures that come about from the Guangxi web sites by modelling Guangxi and identifying Guangxi links. The question that comes to mind, is how do the Guangxi web social networks compare with regular social networks, and can this help explain why Facebook and Twitter are not popular with Chinese users?

Another interesting paper was on Structure of Neighborhoods in a Large Social Network using a dataset obtained from Orange mobile phone users. They used "characteristic patterns" to identify neighbourhoods. The first talk in the second session on Social Computing is on Deriving Expertise Profiles from Tags. Their assumptions are that the set of tags defines a resource, and that these tags are correlated with skills. They performed a study with Dogear and IBMr, internal IBM social computing systems. They also create a scoring model to correlate tags with skills, and did find out that the tags do represent the skills. It would be interesting to see how finding similar users and experts could be used for tag recommendations. The third paper is on Probabilistic Generative Models of the Social Annotation Process addressing the challenge of uncovering hidden structure in social annotations, can we discover communities of users and categories of related tags. Their inspiration is on text-based topic models and their solution is Community-Based Probabilistic Social Annotation (PSA), instead of modelling tags, they also model users. Users belong to hidden communities so how can we find these communities, also related to my paper that I will present tomorrow. They recover communities and categories based on the Gibbs Sampler and used Delicious for their experiments. The PSA is better at predicting unsessn data, and they also did a user study to determine if the tags were correctly specified in the categories.

The next paper is on Detecting Communities from Bipartite Networks Based on Bipartite Modularities.

First day of IEEE Social Computing - Keynote 1

After a series of introductionary remarks to the conference (there are multiple conferences here of which IEEE Social Computing is one), now there is a keynote speech by Stephen Lau on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust in Service-Oriented Environments. Alex Pentland of MIT introduced the IEEE Social Computing conference of which my paper is part of the SIN workshop (Social Intelligence and Networking). If you're in the conference, then please talk to me, I will give a talk in SIN at the last session on Monday called "Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network".

Dr. Lau is talking about information assurance in Service-Oriented Environments. Now, we are entering service-oriented computing. This is nothing new, IBM Research has advocated service-oriented computing for many years, and in academia and research, service-oriented computing is very important. However, there are challenges in service-oriented computing environments, like for example system reliability, must be easy to use, privacy, trust and tracking users. There are XML-based policies to help with this and software engineering is being used to tackle this.

So, what is Dr. Lau's research to address these issues? They have developed a framework for systematically managing and enforcing security policies and a model for flexible security policies. He just showed the workflow of the architecture of their framework. The complicated part of this research is the integrated framework for managing and evaluating security, privacy, trust and risk. We need to have new models for trust and risk considering technical, human and social aspects.