Social Machinery

Sharing small pieces of information about your daily life is a key feature of today’s social networking features. From Facebook to Twitter, answering the question about what are you doing is the most important activity done by roughly 500 Million social networkers. 

But in the future technology will enable your status updates and other social information to be generated automatically from the enviroment. 

A team of European researchers are working on merging the sharing of social information like status, with emerging ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create awareness of users’ location and activities. Combined, the two technologies could provide real-time and ubiquity awareness about your life.

Based on this new technology researched under ASTRA project, Users of a social networking site would rarely have to post status updates manually to let their friends know what they are doing or where they are. Smart objects and sensors in their home or office, the system will continually update their status information even telling friends if they are available to receive calls while they are busy in a customer meeting. 

The project is not only focused on fetching information from real environment and sending it to your social graph but also in how this information could be displayed. For instance, in a smart home environment the system could let users know if someone is available for a phone call by changing the color of the frame of their picture profile. 

The researchers developed this technology 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. 

When it comes to devices and protocols that will enable a social networking aware home or office there is already some interesting progress. 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. The response of test users has been generally positive, although many have raised concerns about privacy and security issues. 

One of the ideas in order to address user concerns about privacy is an adaptive pervasive awareness systems based on the notion of a trustworthy personal “bubble” that ensures privacy. At the same time, they are developing ASTRA-based applications for existing social networking platforms.

Source: Science daily