Social Media: Defining and discovering social context and using it for personal media management.
With computing becoming increasingly mobile in the wake of powerful, portable media devices,
the task of defining and extracting *context* has become a hot research topic. No longer can
the user be assumed to be in 'the office', their full concentration given to the software of
the moment. Research has aimed to make devices more adaptive to their contents, their users,
and their environments. As social beings, an important category is social context.
For personal media management it could be argued that social context contains the set of
conceptions most often brought to bear on their contents: Where was this? Who is that?
What activity were we all doing there? Who do I want to share this with? This project
aims to use signals obtained from unobtrusive data sources available with today's devices,
such as location information (e.g. GPS), to extract socially meaningful indices for
personal media. Social spheres are locations of significance, such as Home, Work and
Recreational Area. Social networks of social ties capture the dynamic web of relationships
in which we are embedded. Social rhythms arise as patterns across these former elements
and allow even finer resolution categorization of activities that occur within them in
space and time. All of this information can then be used, at the very least, to provide
new ways to index and interact with our own, or others', media collections. Initial
work in this area focused on discovering the social spheres Work, Home and Other
from raw, noisy GPS traces of everyday life, and used this information together
with the presence of known persons to provide a novel personal media exploration
environment called Socio-Graph. The interface aimed to allow simple search and
filtering on the concepts most people innately bring to their personal media: social.
