Middleware for social computing: a roadmap
01 May 2012-Journal of Internet Services and Applications (Springer London)-Vol. 3, Iss: 1, pp 117-125
TL;DR: This work identifies three societal grand challenges that are likely to drive future research in social computing and elaborate on how the middleware community can help address them.
Abstract: Social computing broadly refers to supporting social behaviours using computational systems. In the last decade, the advent of Web 2.0 and its social networking services, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking has revolutionised social computing, creating new online contexts within which people interact socially (social networking). With the pervasiveness of mobile devices and embedded sensors, we stand at the brink of another major revolution, where the boundary between online and offline social behaviours blurs, providing opportunities for (re)defining social conventions and contexts once again. But opportunities come with challenges: can middleware foster the engineering of social software? We identify three societal grand challenges that are likely to drive future research in social computing and elaborate on how the middleware community can help address them.
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TL;DR: The architectural evolution required to ensure that the rollout and deployment of smart city technologies is smooth through acknowledging and integrating the strengths of both the system architectures proposed is discussed.
Abstract: Smart cities have rapidly become a hot topic within technology communities, and promise both improved delivery of services to end users and reduced environmental impact in an era of unprecedented urbanization. Both large hightech companies and grassroots citizen-led initiatives have begun exploring the potential of these technologies. Significant barriers remain to the successful rollout and deployment of business models outlined for smart city applications and services, however. Most of these barriers pertain to an ongoing battle between two main schools of thought for system architecture, ICT and telecommunications, proposed for data management and service creation. Both of these system architectures represent a certain type of value chain and the legacy perspective of the respective players that wish to enter the smart city arena. Smart cities services, however, utilize components of both the ICT industry and mobile telecommunications industries, and do not benefit from the current binary perspective of system architecture. The business models suggested for the development of smart cities require a longterm strategic view of system architecture evolution. This article discusses the architectural evolution required to ensure that the rollout and deployment of smart city technologies is smooth through acknowledging and integrating the strengths of both the system architectures proposed.
178 citations
Cites background from "Middleware for social computing: a ..."
...Much of the proposed analysis of data within a smart city context is useless without the social context [4] of the data, however....
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...…have as their basis " the ability to access much broader and bigger amounts of data, linked to the individuals and the society of which they are the fabric: for example Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) -based smartcards give a fine-grained picture of how public transport is being used " [4]....
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TL;DR: Mayer-Schonberger as discussed by the authors is the director of the Information and Informatics Institute at Princeton University, New Jersey, US$24.95 (hardback), ISBN 978•0•691•13861•9
Abstract: by Viktor Mayer‐Schonberger, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2009, 237 pp., US$24.95 (hardback), ISBN 978‐0‐691‐13861‐9 Viktor Mayer‐Schonberger is the director of the Information and In...
138 citations
TL;DR: A practical implementation and experimental evaluations of S-Aframe are presented to demonstrate its reliability and efficiency in terms of computation and communication performance on popular mobile devices and a VSN-based smart ride application is developed to demonstrate the functionality and practical usefulness of the framework.
Abstract: This paper presents S-Aframe, an agent-based multilayer framework with context-aware semantic service (CSS) to support the development and deployment of context-aware applications for vehicular social networks (VSNs) formed by in-vehicle or mobile devices used by drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. The programming model of the framework incorporates features that support collaborations between mobile agents to provide communication services on behalf of owner applications, and service (or resident) agents to provide application services on mobile devices. Using this model, different self-adaptive applications and services for VSNs can be effectively developed and deployed. Built on top of the mobile devices’ operating systems, the framework architecture consists of framework service layer, software agent layer and owner application layer. Integrated with the proposed novel CSS, applications developed on the framework can autonomously and intelligently self-adapt to rapidly changing network connectivity and dynamic contexts of VSN users. A practical implementation and experimental evaluations of S-Aframe are presented to demonstrate its reliability and efficiency in terms of computation and communication performance on popular mobile devices. In addition, a VSN-based smart ride application is developed to demonstrate the functionality and practical usefulness of S-Aframe.
41 citations
Cites methods from "Middleware for social computing: a ..."
...In CSS, we mainly consider three types of semanticbased models for VSN applications developed on S-Aframe: (i) application specific service; (ii) context information; and (iii) user-specified information. a: APPLICATION SPECIFIC SERVICE OF...
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04 May 2015
TL;DR: A novel application-oriented service collaboration (ASCM) model is introduced which can automatically match multiple users with multiple mobile crowd sensing tasks in VSNs in an efficient manner and a context information management model is proposed that aims to enable the mobile community sensing applications to autonomously match appropriate service and information with different users (requesters and participants) in crowdsensing.
Abstract: Driving is an integral part of our everyday lives, and the average driving time of people globally is increasing to 84 minutes everyday, which is a time when people are uniquely vulnerable. A number of research works have identified that mobile crowd sensing in vehicular social networks (VSNs) can be effectively used for many purposes and bring huge economic benefits, e.g., safety improvement and traffic management. This paper presents our effort that toward context-aware mobile crowd sensing in VSNs. First, we introduce a novel application-oriented service collaboration (ASCM) model which can automatically match multiple users with multiple mobile crowd sensing tasks in VSNs in an efficient manner. After that, for users' dynamic contexts of VSNs, we proposes a context information management model, that aims to enable the mobile crowd sensing applications to autonomously match appropriate service and information with different users (requesters and participants) in crowdsensing.
12 citations
Cites background or methods from "Middleware for social computing: a ..."
...…of the service requester (i.e., crowdsensing requester) is compared to that of the service provider (i.e., crowdsensing participant), and their similarity is measured using traditional service matching by simple string or key-word matching, e.g., location based, identities based methods [20]....
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...Compared to other alternative approaches over dynamic networks [20, 22], the proposed CSS has the following advantages....
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07 Apr 2014
TL;DR: It is shown that a city's glocality, measured with social media data, effectively signals the city's economic well-being.
Abstract: Urban resources are allocated according to socio-economic indicators, and rapid urbanization in developing countries calls for updating those indicators in a timely fashion. The prohibitive costs of census data collection make that very difficult. To avoid allocating resources upon outdated indicators, one could partly update or complement them using digital data. It has been shown that it is possible to use social media in developed countries (mainly UK and USA) for such a purpose. Here we show that this is the case for Brazil too. We analyze a random sample of a microblogging service popular in that country and accurately predict the GDPs of 45 Brazilian cities. To make these predictions, we exploit the sociological concept of glocality, which says that economically successful cities tend to be involved in interactions that are both local and global at the same time. We indeed show that a city's glocality, measured with social media data, effectively signals the city's economic well-being.
6 citations
References
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Book•
13 May 2011
TL;DR: The amount of data in the authors' world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey.
Abstract: The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data— will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office. Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.
4,700 citations
"Middleware for social computing: a ..." refers background in this paper
...It is estimated that an average of 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month, with a 40% projected growth in data per year [25]....
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..., it is estimated that big data has a potential annual value to the US health care system alone of $300 billion [25])....
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01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: The strong version of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's argument in The Spirit Level implies that President Obama's fight to reform health care was pointless as discussed by the authors, and that extending the availability of health insurance cannot substantially improve Americans’ health.
Abstract: The strong version of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s argument in The Spirit Level implies that President Obama’s fight to reform health care was pointless. Extending the availability of health insurance cannot substantially improve Americans’ health. Instead, the president would make us all happier, healthier, and longer-lived, their logic suggests, if he could get the richest, say, 5 percent of Americans to leave the country.
1,339 citations
"Middleware for social computing: a ..." refers background in this paper
...That is because being forcibly told how to use a service is perceived as a sign of disrespect by users, and disrespect has often caused violence in physical societies [50] and, for now, only public outcries in digital systems....
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01 May 1999
TL;DR: This work introduces the concept of context widgets that mediate betweent the environment and the application in the same way graphicalwidgets mediate between the user and the applications.
Abstract: Context-enabled applications are just emerging and promise richer interaction by taking environmental context into account. However, they are difficult to build due to their distributed nature and the use of unconventional sensors. The concepts of toolkits and widget libraries in graphical user interfaces has been tremendously successtil, allowing programmers to leverage off existing building blocks to build interactive systems more easily. We introduce the concept of context widgets that mediate between the environment and the application in the same way graphical widgets mediate between the user and the application. We illustrate the concept of context widgets with the beginnings of a widget library we have developed for sensing presence, identity and activity of people and things. We assess the success of our approach with two example context-enabled applications we have built and an existing application to which we have added context-sensing capabilities.
1,337 citations
"Middleware for social computing: a ..." refers background in this paper
...from [42], where ‘context widgets’ where first introduced to...
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05 Nov 2008
TL;DR: The CenceMe application is presented, which represents the first system that combines the inference of the presence of individuals using off-the-shelf, sensor-enabled mobile phones with sharing of this information through social networking applications such as Facebook and MySpace.
Abstract: We present the design, implementation, evaluation, and user ex periences of theCenceMe application, which represents the first system that combines the inference of the presence of individuals using off-the-shelf, sensor-enabled mobile phones with sharing of this information through social networking applications such as Facebook and MySpace. We discuss the system challenges for the development of software on the Nokia N95 mobile phone. We present the design and tradeoffs of split-level classification, whereby personal sensing presence (e.g., walking, in conversation, at the gym) is derived from classifiers which execute in part on the phones and in part on the backend servers to achieve scalable inference. We report performance measurements that characterize the computational requirements of the software and the energy consumption of the CenceMe phone client. We validate the system through a user study where twenty two people, including undergraduates, graduates and faculty, used CenceMe continuously over a three week period in a campus town. From this user study we learn how the system performs in a production environment and what uses people find for a personal sensing system.
1,184 citations
"Middleware for social computing: a ..." refers background in this paper
...book and MySpace), has been presented [29], with the spe-...
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15 Jun 2010
TL;DR: A comprehensive study of smartphone use finds that qualitative similarities exist among users that facilitate the task of learning user behavior and demonstrates the value of adapting to user behavior in the context of a mechanism to predict future energy drain.
Abstract: Using detailed traces from 255 users, we conduct a comprehensive study of smartphone use. We characterize intentional user activities -- interactions with the device and the applications used -- and the impact of those activities on network and energy usage. We find immense diversity among users. Along all aspects that we study, users differ by one or more orders of magnitude. For instance, the average number of interactions per day varies from 10 to 200, and the average amount of data received per day varies from 1 to 1000 MB. This level of diversity suggests that mechanisms to improve user experience or energy consumption will be more effective if they learn and adapt to user behavior. We find that qualitative similarities exist among users that facilitate the task of learning user behavior. For instance, the relative application popularity for can be modeled using an exponential distribution, with different distribution parameters for different users. We demonstrate the value of adapting to user behavior in the context of a mechanism to predict future energy drain. The 90th percentile error with adaptation is less than half compared to predictions based on average behavior across users.
901 citations
"Middleware for social computing: a ..." refers background in this paper
...If online (web-based) social computing was centred around social networking services (e.g., Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter, MySpace) and the sharing of usergenerated content within users’ individual networks, ubiquitous social computing is going to enable societal services, where people’ actions and dealings will be looked at, in relation to their impact on common welfare....
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...Early work that combines physical data (gathered from sensor-enabled mobile phones) and social data (collected from social networking applications such as Facebook and MySpace), has been presented [29], with the specific goal to sense a user’s activity (e.g., being in the gym, in a conversation)....
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...10http://buddypress.org/. hibit rather different behaviours, as already witnessed on social networking websites like Facebook [14] (e.g., amount of shared content and content quality are not equally distributed across users); different behaviours will result, for example, in different amounts of data being gathered and processed, with direct consequences on QoS parameters, such as network latency and battery consumption....
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...hibit rather different behaviours, as already witnessed on social networking websites like Facebook [14] (e....
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...It is estimated that an average of 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month, with a 40% projected growth in data per year [25]....
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