Proposal: CNS 0454081 PI: Constantine Manikopoulos Institution: New Jersey Institute of Technology Program: NSF 04-588 CISE Computing Research Infrastructure CRI: 'SmartCampus' A Wireless Mobile Community System with People-To-People-To- Places Services
This project will create a mobile, wireless NJIT campus community system that will serve as a dispersed laboratory for the study of location-based, online communities with People-To-People-To-Places (P3) Services, in terms of: 1) community building; 2) co-ordination of mobile teams; 3) user privacy [personal location data]; and 4) security. This campus-wide facility will allow the integration of activities across many laboratories and enable anywhere, anytime participation by both students and faculty. SmartCampus will aid the analysis and understanding of the underlying technical and social issues and their interactions, taking into account rising privacy concerns. The latter will be addressed from two perspectives: 1) improving system security and trust with the development of ConexGuard, a novel SmartCampus security-on-demand framework for its heterogeneous environment, and 2) creating privacy-sensitive applications that exploit relevant contextual factors - properties of people and places, and relationships between them - thus addressing issues distinct to P3-Systems. The team includes social scientists, computer scientists and electrical engineers in an interdisciplinary effort addressing issues of emerging interest - particularly privacy in community systems. Broader impacts include education and field testing in Newark New jersey.
The emergence of wireless, mobile, handheld, pervasively connected, location-aware devices supports the next generation of wireless heterogeneous networks, "a network of networks," comprised of cellular, ad hoc, local area, personal area, and sensor and home networks, among others. They should provide "what is needed, where needed, and when needed. This grant allowed for the creation of a mobile, wireless NJIT campus community system that served as a dispersed laboratory for the study of location-based, online communities with People-To-People-To-Places (P3) Services, in terms of: 1) community building; 2) co-ordination of mobile teams; 3) user privacy [personal location data]; and 4) security. This campus-wide facility allowed for the integration of activities across many laboratories and enable anywhere, anytime participation by both students and faculty. SmartCampus aided in the analysis and understanding of the underlying technical and social issues and their interactions, taking into account rising privacy concerns. More specifically this grant was used to provide computer research infrastructure / support for the following NSF mobile social computing grants: NSF DST 0534520 "Using GeoTemporal Social Matching to Support Community" NSF IIS – ITR-CreativeIT – 0714158 "Fostering Creativity in Ubiquitous Social Computing through Casual and Formal Interactions in Interdisciplinary Design Studios" NSF CNS 0831753 Collaborative Research - ANET: Mobius: A Multi-Tier Socially-Aware Network Infrastructure NSF IIS-HCC- 0749389 "SGER: Synchronous Social-Interaction-Space Recommender Systems: Core Components Model Development and Assessment" Our research the Computer Research Infrastructure (CRI) supported during the grant period can be divided into 7 interconnecting themes: 1) Socially-Aware Network Infrastructure (example of associated publication - GDC: Group Discovery using Co-location Traces Steve Mardenfeld, Daniel Boston, Susan Juan Pan, Quentin Jones, Adriana Iamnitchi, and Cristian Borcea. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Symposium on Social Computing Applications (SCA-10), August, 2010.); 2) Capturing and Modeling Large-Scale Community Dynamics (example of associated publication - Daphne R. Raban, Mihai Moldovan, Quentin Jones: An empirical study of critical mass and online community survival. CSCW 2010: 71-80); 3) Systems and Methods for Protecting the Privacy of Users of Social Computing Applications (example of associated publication - Sara Motahari, Sotirios G. Ziavras, Quentin Jones: Online anonymity protection in computer-mediated communication. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 5(3): 570-580 (2010); 4) Mobile ‘Social-Interaction Engagement-Decision’ Support Tools (example of associated publication - Grandhi, S.A., Schuler, R. and Jones, Q. (2011). Telling Calls: Facilitating Mobile Phone Conversation Grounding and Management. In Proceedings of The ACM's 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM Press.) ; 5) Urban Enclave Social Computing Cyber-Infrastructure Design and Development (example of associated publication - Ankur Gupta, Sanil Paul, Quentin Jones, and Cristian Borcea, "Automatic Identification of Informal Social Groups and Places for Geo-Social Recommendations," International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation (IJMNDI), Vol. 2, No. 3/4, December 2007, Pages 159-171); 6) Socio-Technical Impacts of Mobile Social Computing (example of associated publication - Maria Plummer, Linda Plotnick, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, and Quentin Jones. 2008. A Wiki that knows where it is being used: insights from potential users. SIGMIS Database 39, 4 (October 2008), 13-30. DOI=10.1145/1453794.1453799 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1453794.1453799); and 7) Ubiquitous Social Computing Education (example of associated publication - Hall, Theodore W., Jabi, W.; Passerini, K., Borcea, C., Jones, Q. "An Interactive Poster System to Solicit Casual Design Feedback", In A. Kudless, N. Oxman, M. Swackhamer (Eds.), Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation. 28th Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 16-19 October 2008. pp. 438-445). As can be seen from the above list the intellectual merit of the infrastructure grant was broad with each of the research areas supported resulting in numerous publications and patent applications.
