Utilizing social context for providing personalized services to mobile users

A EuroSSC 2010 presentation

Athanasios Karapantelakis and Gerald Q. Maguire Jr.

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm Sweden.Industrial sponsor: Conformiq Inc

Agenda

• Introduction• System overview• Measurements and results• Q&A session

Introduction (1/2)• Trends in social media usage today

– Increase in social network usage, blogging and community sites.• Users spend more time online browsing Social Networks, than reading e-

mail [1]

– Social network users going mobile [2]– Commercial application• “After friends and family, the number one driver for brand trust is online

reviews and feedback from the social media space”. [3]• Social Technologies Gain Traction In The Enterprise – Year: 2010 Will Be The

Year Of differentiation for vendors to stay relevant. [4]

– Personalized social networking in the center of next-generation social networking platforms

Mark Zuckerberg: “Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.” [5][1] eMarketer: More Time Spent on Social Media than Email Worldwide: Email most common daily activity, but social racks up more hours

http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?1008025[2] ComScore inc. - Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year, March 2010http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/Facebook_and_Twitter_Access_via_Mobile_Browser_Grows_by_Triple-Digits[3] The Nielsen Company – Friending the Social Consumer, June 16, 2010http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/friending-the-social-consumer/[4] Forrester Research - Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/enterprise_social_networking_2010_market_overview/q/id/56777/t/2[5] Mark Zuckerberg - Building the Social Web Together April 21, 2010http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=383404517130

Introduction (2/2)• Challenge: how to take advantage of the abundance of social context

available online, to proactively provide personalized content to users.• Problem outline:

– Social context is dispersed in different non-interoperable social networks [1].– Personalized content is provided to the users superficially (e.g. friend

recommendations, group publications, recommendations based on loose criteria etc.).

• Proposed Solution: – (1) A context-aware system which aggregates social context, to synthesize user

profiles and recommend Web feeds of related content to users.– (2) A user mobile application which receives web feeds and presents them to

the user in an intuitive way.• Multiple dimensions in the solution:

– System architecture– Information aggregation and modeling– Criteria of selection

[1] Economist Print Edition: Online social networks: Everywhere and nowhere, March 2008.

System overview

Original Implementation: Karapantelakis, A. and Devlic, A. and Zarifi Eslami, M. and Khamit, S. Printing in Ubiquitous Computing Environments. In: 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, 7-9 Jul 2009, Brisbane, Australia.

Service Agents(Content Providers)

Applications(iOS app)

Context Sources(Social Networks)

Context Broker

SUBSCRIBENOTIFY

Content

PUBLISH

Context Broker

• Raw Context Modeling: FOAF & custom RDF-based schemas create a user profile.– Certain context transcoded with the help of web domain knowledge to produce more meaningful

results.• Maintain Subscription Base:

– Based on SIP/SIMPLE• Decision Algorithm

– Triggered every time an incoming feed arrives. – Calculates how the new feed matches each of the user profiles stored in the system.– If the calculation shows a match for a given profile, the feed is forwarded to the user application via

a NOTIFY message.

User Application

Measurements (1/5)

• Exposed system for public use, for a 6-month period.– 462 users participated during that time.– Privacy concerns: TOS requested users for

permission to access personal information for anonymous statistical analysis.

• Measured system performance and perceived user experience.– Preliminary results

Measurements (2/5)

Measurements (3/5)

Measurements (4/5)

• Reinforcing a statement

Measurements (5/5)

• Percieved User Experience measurements

Conclusion

• Presented a system for aggregating social context for personalized context.– Relevant with current trends.– System exposed to public use for 6 months.– Large dataset of traces after exposing the system

for public use allows for further investigation• Future enhancements– Taking advantage of social relations between

people (friendships, business affiliations, etc.)

Thanks for attending !

• Q&A Session