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