This project supports a workshop whose purpose is to give push to collaborative research between US and EU in the areas of pervasive computing and social networking relative to emerging applications. The collaboration will enrich education, research and development in pervasive social networking. The Workshop will be collocated with the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications in Mannheim, Germany on March 29, 2010. The requested funding is intended to support US researcher to attend this workshop. It is expected that the workshop will lead to both short and long term collaborations between US and EU researchers in this important emerging area.
Social networking is growing rapidly in terms of applications, popularity and challenges. In parallel, pervasive computing research and development in the last decade has led to a number of applications. Ubiquitous presence of smart cell phones carried by gregarious individuals is leading to new applications that exploit the connectivity provided by human social networks and pervasive accessibility and availability to resources/services. Recognizing the need for encouraging collaborative research among US and EU scientists in this exciting area with potential for large number of diverse emerging applications, the US National Science Foundation and the EU Research Board sponsored a 1-day Workshop. The participants of the workshop were charged with the task of identifying the grand challenges in pervasive social networking. In view of the growing importance and popularity of pervasive networks on one hand and social networking on the other, the National Science Foundation, USA and the European Research Commission cosponsored this workshop. The workshop was split into 3 breakout sessions – social networking, context-aware services, and security and privacy. The outcome of the breakout sessions is summarized in the set of research challenges and recommendations to the NSF. The workshop participants highly recommend new initiatives from the NSF and the EU to support research in pervasive computing and social networking. The US and EU scientists have complementary physical environments - from the social networking perspectives Europe has high population density and a highly urban landscape, whereas the US is characterized by large distances and density variations. Moreover, sociological/behavioral/cultural differences as well as differences in wireless communications exist, thus providing a very broad set of user scenarios, critical for studying a variety of user and application cases. Social networks in the two continents exhibit different characteristics that will need to be incorporated in emerging pervasive social networks. New guidelines must be established for exchange of data from online social networks between the EU and US. Collaborative research is expected to lead to: i) better understanding of the challenging problems associated with pervasive computing and social networking; ii) large scale gathering of data for multidisciplinary research; and iii) development of new applications and improvement of existing ones. Long-term collaboration with the EU groups will lead to: i) sharing of resources and data; ii) large scale experiments; and iii) exchange visits of scientists as well as students, between the US and EU countries. The workshop participants identified 4 grand challenges: 1. Understanding and characterization of the inter-relation between real-world social structures and online social networks, 2. Investigations to create and develop new paradigms for context determination, 3. Research to find the balance between conflicting pairs of issues (e.g., security and context awareness) in specific application domains, and 4. Focus on Infrastructure, Experimentation, and Multidisciplinary Research and Education ------------------------------------------------------------------------
