Bringing social networks into a physical space - social sensing computing

Summary 

This paper used the RFID technology to recognize the user's social cluster from DBLP database. The authors provided a big display screen within a conference that participants can interact with the interpersonal connections. This paper actually consisted with several interesting elements together: 1) the RFID sensor: the RFID sensor is aim to recognize the user approaching the display screen and provide the personified social network graph to user; 2) graph exploration: the display screen provided the zoom in/out function that provide the exploration functions for users to discover the interpersonal relationship; 3) heterogeneous network: the displayed graph contained with the conference/co-citation/co-authorship features, this make the user can discover the hidden relationship or knowledge insides the network.

The experiment result showed a positive feedback from users, but some of the issues attract my eye: 1) limited user usage: only few of the conference participants actually used the system, fewer people used more than one time; 2) the cold start problem: some junior scholar may not have publication or their publication is not listed inside the DBLP database; 3) the privacy issue that display your personal social network in a public view display screen; 4) the cost and purpose to deploy RFID: the usage of the RFID tag is not significantly necessary.

This idea is interesting to make the conference with more fun and entourage people to explore the social interaction during the event. But I think this tool should be more personalize and privacied. For instance, to display the result with a personal device, e.g. cell phone. In other way, the design of the graph is not highlighting the meaningful information for users. To show everything on screen is almost equal nothing for users. This might be the reason the user return rate is low. These issues would be valuable for the future application.

Besides, the RFID tag implied a research subject about the social sensing computing. With the developing of wearable devices, there are more and more sensor, tag or device that with the potential to load the user data for multiply computing task. For research purpose, to gather all of these data is critical, also, difficult. However, there are many alternative way to "simulate" the scenarios. For instance, a QR code, a reference number or mobile phone built-in function (e.g. GPS, Bluetooth). All of the technologies are interesting, but also require many developing efforts. Nor sure if this could be our expertise to do all these things by our own?

Reference

1. Konomi, Shini'chi, et al. "Supporting colocated interactions using RFID and social network displays." Pervasive Computing, IEEE 5.3 (2006): 48-56. Link

Summary for two papers of facilitate the conference by social games

Summary 

To help conference attendees gain social capital or expand social networking is always an interesting research topic. One of the direction is by "social games". The paper from [1] and [2], both design a social game to facilitate people social interaction inside a conference. In  [1], the author designed a game requires 2-6 people to communicate on a puzzle of ball and hole location matching. This is a tool for "ice-breaking" between the conference attendees through the teamwork procedure. In [2], the author discussed an approach to gain community retention by the social game. They build up a cell phone app that supports a collaborative function on the task. The users can solve problems insides the game with others, as a community. The author argued, this app encourages user to improve their network connectivity. Furthermore, this app may be used inside the class to increase the class retention rate for minority groups.

Both of the papers proposed an interesting idea about social game. However, I think the evaluation would be an issue to support the above claims. In [1], the author proposed a questionnaire for the game players. Based on the response, the users indicated the communication and team-work function are the most important election for them. The evidence to support the game usefulness in helping users to "making friends fast" is not strong. In [2], the authors only present the evaluation plan about how the social game is helping to build a community. The experimental data are still lacking.

I think the research question can be more specific classified as 1) cold-breaking; 2) social interaction and engagement; 3) social recommendation; 4)social networking ; 5) teamwork and communication and 6) community formation and retention. For each of them, the experimental design should be varied. Some of the aspect is hard to find a ground truth to prove the model/game/app effectiveness. For instance, if the user talk to each other more due to the apps? It is not easy to compare the talk frequency before/after the game play. Hence, an experiment design for certain research questions is critical. Some of the ideas: 1) A/B testing to different group of users; 2) quick questionnaire/feedback insides the game; 3) clicking/bookmarking/friendship behavior analysis, etc.

Reference

[1] Evie Powell, Rachel Brinkman, Tiffany Barnes, and Veronica Catete. 2012. Table tilt: making friends fast. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games(FDG '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 242-245. DOI=10.1145/2282338.2282386 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2282338.2282386

[2] Samantha L. Finkelstein, Eve Powell, Andrew Hicks, Katelyn Doran, Sandhya Rani Charugulla, and Tiffany Barnes. 2010. SNAG: using social networking games to increase student retention in computer science. In Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 142-146. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1822090.1822131