KMi Seminars
Issues in social mobile computing
This event took place on Friday 23 September 2005 at 13:30

 
Ian Smith Intel Research Laboratory, Seattle, USA

What is social mobile computing? This is a talk in two parts. In the first part, I'll outline what Intel Research Seattle is doing in the area of Social Mobile Computing. This is a new research area, focused on interactions between people that occur outside the traditional "work" settings and where the communications are conducted via mobile devices. In the second part of the talk I'll go walk through the mobile interaction design challenges of one project we are working on and--with any luck--get the audience to solve some our problems for us! The domain of this project is to allow people to more easily "meet-up" or "rendezvous."

Biography: Ian Smith is a senior researcher at the Intel Research Seattle lab in Seattle, Washington. His work focuses on having a big bowl of ubicomp technology, social science, and some software engineering. Stir vigorously and don't forget to drizzle on some privacy. He previously stirred the pot at the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California. He was granted a Ph.D. and a chef's hat from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.

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KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.