This research explores the benefits of embedding social knowledge in network protocols and services to support mobile social computing. Specifically, it investigates 1) which mobile social computing problems can be solved with socially aware networks; 2) what social information is amenable to being captured and utilized by these networks (assuming privacy preserving capabilities); 3) what mechanisms and system architectures are necessary to enable dynamic network adaptation to geo-social context changes; 4) how to leverage these mechanisms to design socially-aware protocols and services; 5) how to define and enforce individual and global privacy policies, in general and for accessing social context; and 6) which programming abstractions provide both flexibility and simplicity for rapid mobile social computing application development.
This research will lead to a self-organizing, self-adaptive, community-oriented, two-tier network infrastructure for mobile social computing. The mobile human-centric tier runs mobile applications and collects geo-social context information. The peer-to-peer system tier runs services in support of mobile applications and adapts to the geo-social context to enable energy-efficient, scalable, secure, and reliable applications. For large-scale evaluation, this project uses the NSF-sponsored SmartCampus testbed with hundreds smart phones distributed to students.
This research will expand the understanding of mobile social computing, an area of great practical relevance to the society at large. To spur the dissemination of results, the source code is made publicly available. Noteworthy educationally is that both institutions, University of South Florida and New Jersey Institute of Technology, are among the national leaders in the percentages of graduates from under-represented groups, and the researchers have specific plans to attract students from these groups to research opportunities in the project. Finally, the foundational results of the project are integrated in an inter-disciplinary studio course that creatively explores design ideas in mobile social computing.
