Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

MobiSoC: a middleware for mobile social computing applications

  • Published:
Mobile Networks and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recently, we started to experience a shift from physical communities to virtual communities, which leads to missed social opportunities in our daily routine. For instance, we are not aware of neighbors with common interests or nearby events. Mobile social computing applications (MSCAs) promise to improve social connectivity in physical communities by leveraging information about people, social relationships, and places. This article presents MobiSoC, a middleware that enables MSCA development and provides a common platform for capturing, managing, and sharing the social state of physical communities. Additionally, it incorporates algorithms that discover previously unknown emergent geo-social patterns to augment this state. To demonstrate MobiSoC's feasibility, we implemented and tested on smart phones two MSCAs for location-based mobile social matching and place-based ad hoc social collaboration. Experimental results showed that MobiSoC can provide good response time for 1,000 users. We also demonstrated that an adaptive localization scheme and carefully chosen cryptographic methods can significantly reduce the resource consumption associated with the location engine and security on smart phones. A user study of the mobile social matching application proved that geo-social patterns can double the quality of social matches and that people are willing to share their location with MobiSoC in order to benefit from MSCAs.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
Figure 18
Figure 19

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Jones Q, Grandhi S, Karam S, Whittaker S, Zhou C, Terveen L (2007) Geographic place and community information preferences. In Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 17(2–3):137–167

    Google Scholar 

  2. Jones Q, Grandhi S, Terveen L, Whittaker S (2004) People-to-people-to-geographical places: The P3 framework for location-based community systems. In Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Kluwer Academic Publishers

  3. Sensor, N http://www.nokia.com/sensor/

  4. Terry M, Mynatt ED, Ryall K, Leigh D (2002) Social net: using patterns of physical proximity over time to infer shared interests. In Proc. Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2002) pp 816–817

  5. Eagle N, Pentland A (2005) Social serendipity: mobilizing social software. In Pervasive Computing IEEE 4(2):28–34

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. iTunes Starbucks http://www.apple.com/itunes/starbucks/

  7. Geo-notes.Place based virtual notes. http://csd.ssvl.kth.se/csd2002-geonotes/

  8. DodgeBall http://www.dodgeball.com/

  9. Navigator VZ https://vznavigator.vzw.com/

  10. Bottazzi D, Montanari R, Toninelli A (2007) Context-aware middleware for anytime, anywhere social networks. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 22(5):23–32 doi:10.1109/MIS.2007.4338491

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Griswold WG, Boyer R, Brown SW, Truong TM (2003) A component architecture for an extensible, highly integrated context-aware computing infrastructure. In International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2003) pp 363–372, May 2003

  12. Bicocchi N, Castelli G, Mamei M, Rosi A, Zambonelli F (2008) Supporting location-aware services for mobile users with the whereabouts diary. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications (MOBILWARE'08) pp 1–6, February 2008

  13. Barabasi AL (2002) Linked: the new science of networks. Perseus Publishing

  14. Newman M (2003) The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review 45(2):167–256 doi:10.1137/S003614450342480

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Iamnitchi A, Foster I (2005) Interest-aware information dissemination in small-world communities. In Proceedings of High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) pp 167–175, July 2005

  16. Miklas AG, Gollu KK, Chan2 KKW, Saroiu S, Gummadi KP, De Lara E (2007) Exploiting social interactions in mobile systems. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp’07) pp 409–428, September 2007

  17. Campbell AT, Eisenman SB, Lane ND, Miluzzo E, Peterson RA, Lu H, Zheng X, Musolesi M, Fodor K, Ahn G (2008) The rise of people-centric sensing. IEEE Internet Computing 12(4):12–21 doi:10.1109/MIC.2008.90

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Burke J, Estrin D, Hansen M, Parker A, Ramanathan N, Reddy S, Srivastava MB (2006) Participatory sensing. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys’06), October 2006

  19. Gaonkar S, Li J, Choudhury RR, Cox L, Schmidt A (2008) Micro-blog: sharing and querying content through mobile phones and social participation. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’08) pp 174–186, June 2008

  20. Froehlich J, Chen MY, Consolvo S, Harrison B, Landay JA (2007) My experience: a system for in situ tracing and capturing of user feedback on mobile phones. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys'07) pp 57–70, June 2007

  21. Hengartner U, Steenkiste P (2006) Avoiding privacy violations caused by context-sensitive services. Pervasive and Mobile Computing. PerCom 2006 Special Issue 2(4):427–452

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Hong J, Landay J (2004) An architecture for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (2004) pp 177–189, June 2004

  23. Cox LP, Dalton A, Marupadi V (2007) .SmokeScreen: flexible privacy controls for presence-sharing. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’07) pp 233–245, June 2007

  24. Cornelius C, Kapadia A, Kotz D, Peebles D, Shin M, Triandopoulos N (2008) Anonysense: privacy-aware people-centric sensing. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’08) pp 211–224, June 2008

  25. Dey AK, Salber D, Abowd G (2001) A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications. Human-Computer Interaction 16(2):97–166 doi:10.1207/S15327051HCI16234_02

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Roman M, Hess C, Cerqueira R, Campbell RH, Nahrstedt K (2002) Gaia: a middleware infrastructure to enable active spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine 4(1):74–83 doi:10.1109/MPRV.2002.1158281

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Grimm R, Davis J, Lemar E, MacBeth A, Swanson S, Anderson T, Bershad B, Borriello G, Gribble S, Wetherall D (2004) System support for pervasive applications. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 22(4):421–486 doi:10.1145/1035582.1035584

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Riva R, Nadeem T, Borcea C, Iftode L (2007) Context-aware migratory services in ad hoc networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 6(12):1313–1328 doi:10.1109/TMC.2007.1053

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Bellavista P, Corradi A, Foschini L (2004) MUM: a middleware for the provisioning of continuous services to mobile users. In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'04). IEEE Computer Society Press, Jun 2004

  30. Wang L, Jajodia S, Wijesekera D (2004) Securing OLAP data cubes against privacy breaches. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy pp 161–175. May, 2004

  31. Weme: WebSphere Everyplace Micro Edition. http://www.ibm.com/software/wireless/weme/

  32. Xstream: JAVA-XML parser. http://xstream.codehaus.org/

  33. Ksoap: Simple object access protocol for J2ME. http://ksoap.objectweb.org/

  34. Schilit B, LaMarca A, Borriello G, Griswold W, McDonald D, Lazowska E, Balachandran A, Hong J, Iverson V (2003) Challenge: ubiquitous location-aware computing and the place lab initiative. In proceedings of the 1st acm international workshop on wireless mobile applications and services on wlan (wmash 2003). San Diego, CA, Sep 2003

  35. Cheng Y, Chawathe Y, LaMarca A, Krumm J (2004) accuracy characterization for metropolitan-scale wi-fi localization. In Proceedings of Mobisys 2004. Washington, DC

  36. Gupta A, Paul S, Jones Q, Borcea C (2007) Automatic identification of informal social groups and places for geo-social recommendations. In The International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation (IJMNDI) 2(3/4):159–171 doi:10.1504/IJMNDI.2007.017320

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Hightower J, Consolvo S, LaMarca A, Smith I, Hughes J, Borriello G (2005) Learning and recognizing the places we go. In Proceedings of International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (2005), Tokyo, Japan, September, pp.159–176

  38. Kang JH, Welbourne W, Stewart B, Borriello G (2004) Extracting places from traces of location. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Applications and Services on WLAN (2004), Philadelphia, USA, October, pp.110–118

  39. Dunbar R (1992) Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution 22:469–493 doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Facebook MD http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

  41. acbTaskMan http://www.acbpocketsoft.com/Products/acbTaskMan/acbTaskMan-Overview-7.html

  42. Clarissa Application on Facebook. http://apps.facebook.com/matching/

Download references

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. CNS-0454081, IIS-0534520, CNS-0520033, and CNS-0831753. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors thank Quentin Jones for his participation in the initial design of MobiSoC. We also thank Sanil Paul, Arjun Anand, and Jason Wolf for help with the experiments on smart phones.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    Ankur Gupta, Achir Kalra, Daniel Boston & Cristian Borcea

Authors
  1. Ankur Gupta
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Achir Kalra
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Daniel Boston
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Cristian Borcea
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristian Borcea.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Gupta, A., Kalra, A., Boston, D. et al. MobiSoC: a middleware for mobile social computing applications. Mobile Netw Appl 14, 35–52 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-008-0114-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-008-0114-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation