Viral Communications

What you own can sometimes tell what you need and how you feel. We have built a complete portable inventory of the possessions of one person and we are making that available in place and at the moment. Our system extracts affect information from our context (what we're wearing, what we're doing, where we're doing it), and matches it with a music playlist to provide a soundtrack, which makes it easy to enjoy and discover music that fits your lifestyle. It can also inform our financial interactions with the world and serve as guidance for our community.

The Digital Aura project deals with ways to give end users better control over their personal information, leveraging principles of social and physical proximity. People are quite good at establishing a social style and using it in different communications contexts, but they do less well when the communication is mediated by computer networks. It is hard to control what information is revealed and how one's digital persona will be presented or interpreted. In this project, we ameliorate this problem by creating a "Virtual Private Milieu," a "VPM," that allows networked devices to act on our behalf and project a "digital aura" to other people and devices around us in a manner analogous to the way humans naturally interact with one another. The dynamic aggregation of the different auras and facets that the devices expose to one another creates social spheres of interaction between sets of active devices, and consequently between people. We demonstrate our prototype of the "Social Dashboard," a readily usable control for one's aura. Finally, we present "Comm.unity," a software package that allows developers and researchers easy implementation and deployment of local and distant social applications, and present several applications developed over this platform.

Ego establishes a decentralized social-networking platform whereby users retain ownership and control over their personal information and social connections. Rather than posting your interests and social connections to Facebook, location to Google Latitude, and status to Twitter, post it all to yourself. You produce the data over a lifetime, and you should own, control access to, and, if necessary, set the price for it! We demonstrate a society of "agents" representing both humans and non-humans to each other and to Web 2.0 applications. The architecture of Ego-based agents resembles a P2P file-sharing network; it allows user applications that operate by crawling Ego's decentralized network to gather contextual information (e.g., location, mood) and share it with agents of friends; it also allows applications run by a company that provides incentives such as discounts to agents in exchange for revealing subsets of their personal data.

Fluid Voice is a group communication platform that allows both real-time and asynchronous group activity participation. Users can form local audio broadcast networks for group discussion, similar to a conference call. Disconnected group members can be included in these discussions asynchronously: the audio is recorded and sent to them opportunistically. In this way, membership of a group persists in the face of disconnection caused by communication failures and mobility. Our platform supports other asynchronous applications: polling and voting, sharing of wish lists, and text messaging. Our current work focuses on usability and how to leverage opportunistic interactions in a group-oriented network in a dynamic, mobile context. We aim to understand how to propagate relevant data to every member of a group in an efficient manner.

Open Spaces combines the use of public displays with private mobile devices. This allows group collaboration and shared use of public screens. We demonstrate this via a public/private Scrabble game and a shared calendar. The underlying architecture extends to use social predicates to determine who sees what.

With the tremendous explosion of community photos, how can we present a coherent visual model for a large-scale community photo collection? In this project, we aim to build a photo space explorer for effective image browsing, retrieval, and annotation on top of our existing, distributed, community storage mechanism. The key is to identify object and feature points relations among community photos in an effective and scalable way, and to distribute the storage through an ensemble of mobile devices. The photo space explorer also enables users to navigate community photo collections using a 3-D browser.

We are exploring the creation of Internal Knowledge Markets, with a goal of bringing an electronic, distributed market (decentralized information creation) to a firm or a laboratory in an effort to both measure the value of knowledge created and link this to productivity and/or profits. A key advantage of this study will be a direct appeal to information economic theory to design an information market. In particular, we will appeal to two-sided network theory, principles of information asymmetry, and price theory. We seek to bring the rigor of this discipline to real-world applications, and measure the results.

Social Saver is a mobile architecture to facilitate social interactions in the act of purchasing goods and services. The applications in development will let people collaborate to save money and provide incentives to test the means to do this, including getting permission to buy something, making a donation when one incurs a savings, and letting others know what you are doing. We will be demoing LunchTime and SocialMenu.

The future of mobile communications will certainly be one where devices will opportunistically connect to a variety of networks, obtaining and providing services on the fly. Our portable devices will carry our identity and act as intermediaries between users and their rich environments. The Amulet embodies this vision. We are developing this new device which instantiates a user's identity and provides a computing model that allows the device to securely exploit its context and surrounding infrastructure in an open, secure, and adaptable manner.

Twopons is a Twitter-based viral coupon service which helps eliminate unnecessary spam by allowing only those people who actually make purchases in certain stores to share the coupons with their peers. It is a social-network-oriented coupon system that runs on top of the Open Transaction Network. It also incorporates geographic filtering to make it only available in locations of interest.