Narasimhan Nitya
Ad Hoc Social Networking: Where proximity meets affinity
Contact Information
1301 E Algonquin Road, IL02-2240
Schaumburg, IL 60173
Biography
Nitya Narasimhan is a researcher in the Pervasive Platforms
and Architectures Lab at Motorola, with current research focus on distributed
application architectures, service middleware for mobile ad hoc networks, near
field communication and peer-to-peer platforms. Her doctoral research focused
on reliability for distributed Java systems.
Position Paper
Social networking leverages established relationships
between some users to enable the creation of new relationships between many
others. Internet-based sites such as
LinkedIn,
Friendster, and
Tribe.Net have
leveraged such networks to provide services such as job-finding, dating and
recommendations. These centralized, infrastructure-based networks benefit from
the size and diversity of the member population but can be influenced by the
vagaries of publicly-articulated identity—in particular, such networks are
driven by their implicit trust in the user-specified relationships and can
therefore be undermined by poor status updates or by the limited options in
establishing the degrees of relationship beyond a binary “yes or no” (friend or
stranger).
By comparison, an ad hoc peer-to-peer network limits its
users to the more opportunistic interactions that occur only when they are in
the physical proximity of other members. A social network created by such
serendipitous encounters is likely to be relatively smaller in size and reach.
However, because such interactions are spontaneous (require minimal effort from
the user), they are also likely to provide an unbiased and dynamic view of the
status of the user’s relationship with peers in that social network. In other
words, the duration, purpose and frequency of encounters can be used to
determine automatically the potential for a social link between the
participants and to establish this link after ratification by the user.
Furthermore, automated tracking of any subsequent interactions between the
users can be exploited to establish the degree of the relationship (friends and
family, colleagues, peer acquaintances and familiar strangers ) and maintain
updates on its validity over time.
With the Acapella middleware platform, we have begun
exploring the utility and challenges of supporting such p2p services over ad
hoc wireless LANs. Acapella is mobile Java middleware that provides APIs for
enabling three classes of behavior—federation, tribal and encounter—that
underscore the “Share-Interact-Notify” capabilities required for social
interaction. Each requires or involves a different degree of trust and
familiarity between users. Federation focuses on remote access to shared data;
typically, such services are extended only to trusted peers. Tribal focuses on
interactive services such as gaming or chat; such services are non-invasive and
can be extended also to “suitable” strangers. Encounters focus on alerting the
user to specific events of interest; encounters are asynchronous and can be
activated both by known peers or by strangers that match specific criteria.
In the presentation, we will focus on the challenges
(energy-efficiency, user-transparency and reduced complexity) faced in
developing the Acapella platform and discuss insights gained from a user study
conducted using both storyboards and working prototypes. The goal is to
motivate a discussion on how such ad hoc p2p platforms can both complement and
validate infrastructure-based social networks, thus increasing their value in
enterprise and consumer environments. This will require rethinking the
definition of social identity (to enable its seamless translation and tracking
across both infrastructured and ad hoc environments) and addressing related
issues such as privacy and access control. Finally, it will enable social
networking “routes” to be evaluated based not only on hop-distance, but also on
most-recent activity.
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