The mobile social network (MSN) combines techniques in social science and wireless communications for mobile networking The MSN can be considered as a system which provides a variety of data delivery services involving the social relationship among mobile users This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the MSN specifically from the perspectives of applications, network architectures, and protocol design issues First, major applications of the MSN are reviewed Next, different architectures of the MSN are presented Each of these different architectures supports different data delivery scenarios The unique characteristics of social relationship in MSN give rise to different protocol design issues These research issues (eg, community detection, mobility, content distribution, content sharing protocols, and privacy) and the related approaches to address data delivery in the MSN are described At the end, several important research directions are outlined

Applications, Architectures, and Protocol Design Issues for Mobile Social Networks: A Survey

The recent re-emergence of serious games as a branch of video games and as a promising frontier of education has introduced the concept of games designed for a serious purpose other than pure entertainment. To date the major applications of serious games include education and training, engineering, medicine and healthcare, military applications, city planning, production, crisis response, to name just a few. If utilised alongside, or combined with conventional training and educational approaches, serious games could provide a more powerful means of knowledge transfer in almost every application domain. Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers an insightful introduction to the development and applications of games technologies in educational settings. It includes cutting-edge academic research and industry updates that will inform readers of current and future advances in the area. The book is suitable for both researchers and educators who are interested in using games for educational purposes, as well as game professionals requiring a thorough understanding of issues involved in the application of video games technology into educational settings. It is also applicable to programmers, game artists, and management contemplating or involved in the development of serious games for educational or training purposes.

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Serious Games and Edutainment Applications

Welcome to the CHI 2007 proceedings. We believe the technical papers and notes herein present some of the best current work in the diverse and dynamic field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

CHI is the leading HCI conference. Creating the technical program requires a huge investment of time and effort from members of the research community. 840 submissions were processed (571 papers, 269 notes), requiring over 3000 reviews. We thank all the reviewers for the dedication with which they undertook this task. We are particularly indebted to the papers and notes program committee members, also known as the Associate Chairs (ACs). Balancing areas of expertise, ACs were selected from the field's leading researchers. The AC role included recruiting all reviewers, moderating and supervising the review process to ensure a high-quality set of reviews was obtained, initiating and organizing author rebuttal and reviewer discussions and approving final submissions. The estimated time expenditure to serve as an AC was 11 days of full-time work; many committee members spent more time than that. Papers ACs came to San Jose in December 2006 from around the world for two intense days of review, debates, and deliberation; Notes ACs who could not attend the parallel notes meeting in San Jose engaged in a virtual conference. The committee was extremely serious and careful in making CHI paper and note decisions, with many submissions receiving multiple discussions, before and during the program committee meetings. No review process can guarantee perfect decisions, but we are confident that every possible effort was made to ensure fair process and high quality decision-making. This year's program committee certainly has our respect and gratitude, and deserves the sincere appreciation of the entire HCI community. We would also like to thank the ACs and their organizations for underwriting the travel expenses for meeting.

CHI is both a journal-quality archival forum and a community-building conference. To encourage quality in the written presentation of accepted work, all of the 142 full paper and 40 note acceptances were provisional. As a result, authors actively responded and incorporated feedback from the reviews into the final versions of the papers that appear here.

Twenty-eight accepted papers and four accepted notes (5% of submissions) deemed to make an especially noteworthy contribution to human-computer interaction research were nominated by the program committee for Best Paper and Best Note Awards; these nominated papers and notes are identified in the Final Program. At the conference, up to six of these will be announced as winners of a CHI Best Paper Award (1% of submissions), and one note will be selected as an exemplary note. While all papers accepted into the CHI technical papers program have passed a rigorous examination of their quality, the Best Paper and Best Notes Awards signal and reward particularly outstanding contributions in each year.

CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Content delivery is one of the most important technologies used in Mobile Social Networks (MSNs). Smart devices could enable mobile users to create and use a rich set of services through available resources in the surrounding environment opportunistically. This paper presents the framework of distributed buffer storage aided hybrid Mobile Social Networks (MSN). Based on this, we propose a new scheme with distributed storage for efficient end-to-end content delivery in intermittently connected MSNs. Our proposed hybrid architecture is able to offer fast and reliable delivery services by distributing buffer storage located close to mobile users of the opportunistic MSN. Simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, which indicate that it is helpful to improve network performance in terms of content delivery ratio, throughput and end-to-end delays.

Architecture of Hybrid Mobile Social Networks for Efficient Content Delivery

http://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/pervasive%20computing/Bellavista%20-%20Mobile%20Social%20Networking%20Middleware%20-%202013.pdf

Mobile social networking middleware: A survey

Two significant but independent trends in recent years are the popularity of social networking applications and the adoption of mobile devices, notably smart phones. The current generation of smart phones are pocket computers that, compared to their predecessors, are relatively well resourced. Existing support for social networking tends to take the form of Web-based applications that are accessed from the desktop. Our interests are in leveraging today's smart phone as a platform for hosting social networking applications. To this end we have developed a middleware solution that includes i) communication and service hosting infrastructure and ii) a context-aware framework. The infrastructure resolves challenges encountered when hosting services on 3G networks offered by mobile network operators. In addition, the middleware includes mechanisms to promote application scalability, availability, and responsiveness -- and generally conserves smart phone resources such as power supply and network bandwidth. The context-aware framework is extensible and allows an open-ended set of context items and context sources to be managed. This framework allows context data, such as user location and activity, to be propagated around a user community. Performance experiments have validated the middleware, demonstrating that it can satisfy the requirements for scalability, availability, and responsiveness. A small user study has confirmed interest in the use of mobile devices to deliver social networking services; the study has also raised concerns -- in particular security and privacy -- relating to the platform.

Thomas Carey

Papers

Middleware for Social Networking on Mobile Devices