Location-Aware Mobile Social Networks

The SocialFusion Project in Context-Aware Mobile Cloud Computing

The SocialFusion project in mobile social networks at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Department of Computer Science seeks to conduct ground-breaking research in mobile systems, social networks, networking privacy/anonymity, data mining, mobility, user interfaces, mobile cloud infrastructure, and context-aware computing. The SocialFusion Project fuses together location-aware mobile networks, sensor networks, and context-aware social networks to enable a new generation of exciting mobile cloud applications that are personalized to your location, activities, preferences, and friendship relationships. Some examples of context-aware applications we have built and deployed include:

OutWithFriendz, an Android and iPhone app that enables us to study how groups of mobile users make decisions about where to go out for lunch/dinner and when
SocialFlicks, which combines an iPhone user's personal location with the user's Facebook profile to play video on a nearby screen customized to the preferences of that user, and
a context-aware music jukebox, which plays songs you want to hear when you walk into a room.
SocialDining, which recommends restaurants to groups of mobile users/friends
RescueMe, which provides mobile augmented reality to guide users within buildings in emergency evacuation situations, such as fires
An augmented reality mobile application to facilitate healthy grocery shopping
A danger-sensing mobile application called myBlackBox that is customized for individuals and provides warning notifications whenever it senses danger

We are building the SocialFusion infrastructure to support context-aware mobile cloud computing. We also are building novel applications on top of SocialFusion to demonstrate the power of context-aware mobile cloud computing.

Prof. Han summarized our thoughts in the talk "Towards Context-Aware Computing Via the Mobile Social Cloud" at the June 2010 Microsoft Research Networking Summit on Mobile Cloud Computing in Seattle, Washington.

Paramvir Bahl, Richard Y. Han, Li Erran Li, and Mahadev Satyanarayanan. 2012. "Advancing the state of mobile cloud computing." In Proceedings of the third ACM workshop on Mobile cloud computing and services (MCS '12). pp. 21-28. DOI=10.1145/2307849.2307856 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2307849.2307856
Best Paper Award: Junho Ahn, Richard Han, "RescueMe: An Indoor Mobile Augmented-Reality Evacuation System by Personalized Pedometry", 2011 IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference (APSCC 2011), pp. 70-77.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, "Social-K: Real-Time K-Anonymity Guarantees for Social Network Applications", IEEE International Workshop on SECurity and SOCial Networking (SESOC), 2010, pp. 600-606.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, "Solutions to Security and Privacy Issues in Mobile Social Networking," cse, vol. 4, pp.1036-1042, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, 2009 (Workshop on the Social Mobile Web 2009, associated with IEEE SocialCom 2009).
Gartrell M., Beach A., Ramanarayanankrishnaniyer J., Xing X., Lv Q., Han R., Mishra S., Seada K., "Integrating Wikipedia, Facebook, and Other Personal Online Context into Collaborative E-Brainstorming,"
Workshop on Collective Intelligence In Organizations (CIorg): Tools and Studies, 2010, associated with GROUP 2010.
Mahnaz Roshanaei, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra, “EmotionSensing: Predicting Mobile User Emotions”, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2017). 6 pages. (to appear)

Publications:

Shuo Zhang, Khaled Alanezi, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, Qin Lv, Shivakant Mishra, “Understanding Group Event Scheduling via the OutWithFriendz Mobile Application”, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Issue 4, December 2017 (will be presented at UbiComp 2018).
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Xinyu Xing, Richard Han, Qin Lv, Shivakant Mishra, Karim Seada, "Fusing Mobile, Sensor, and Social Data To Fully Enable Context-Aware Computing", Eleventh ACM Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), 2010, pp. 61-66.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Sirisha Akkala, Jack Elston, John Kelley, Keisuke Nishimoto, Baishakhi Ray, Sergei Razgulin, Karthik Sundaresan, Bonnie Surendar, Michael Terada, and Richard Han, "WhozThat? Evolving an Ecosystem for Context-Aware Mobile Social Networks", IEEE Network, July/August 2008, pp. 50-55.
Mike Gartrell, Xinyu Xing, Qin Lv, Aaron Beach, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra, Karim Seada, "Enhancing Group Recommendation by Incorporating Social Relationship Interactions", GROUP 2010.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, "q-Anon: Rethinking Anonymity for Social Networks", in Proceedings of the IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), August 2010, pp. 185-192. doi:10.1109/SocialCom.2010.34.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, "q-Anon: Practical Anonymity for Social Networks", International Journal of Social Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems (IJSCCPS), Inderscience, 2012 - Vol. 1, No.3 pp. 223 - 241.
Junho Ahn, James Williamson, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, Qin Lv, and Shivakant Mishra. 2015. Supporting Healthy Grocery Shopping via Mobile Augmented Reality. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), vol. 12, 1s, Article 16 (October 2015), pp. 1-24. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2808207
Junho Ahn, Richard Han, myBlackBox: Blackbox Mobile Cloud Systems for Personalized Unusual Event Detection, Sensors, Volume 16, Issue 5, 753; doi:10.3390/s16050753, 20 pages.

Technical Reports/Theses:

Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra, "Rethinking Anonymity for Social Networks", Technical Report CU-CU-1065-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, June 2010.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra, "CawbWeb: Towards a Standardized Programming Framework to Enable a Context-Aware Web", Technical Report, CU-CS-1063-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, March 2010.
Mike Gartrell, Aaron Beach, Jai Ramanarayanankrishnaniyer, Xinyu Xing, Richard Han, Qin Lv, Shivakant Mishra, Karim Seada, "Integrating Wikipedia and Facebook Context into Collaborative E-Brainstorming," Technical Report CU-CS-1073-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, September 2010.

Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Xinyu Xing, Richard Han, Qin Lv, Shivakant Mishra, Karim Seada, "SocialFusion: Context-Aware Inference and Recommendation By Fusing Mobile, Sensor, and Social Data", Technical Report CU-CS-1059-09, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, December 2009.
Aaron Beach, Mike Gartrell, Baishakhi Ray, and Richard Han, "Secure SocialAware: A Security Framework for Mobile Social Networking Applications", Technical Report CU-CS-1054-09, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, June 2009.
Mike Gartrell, "SocialAware: Context-Aware Multimedia Presentation Via Mobile Social Networks", M.S. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, December 2008.