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Connecting people through physical proximity and physical resources at a conference

Published: 01 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This work investigates how to bridge the gap between offline and online behaviors at a conference and how the physical resources in the conference (the physical objects used in the conference for gathering attendees together in engaging an activity such as rooms, sessions, and papers) can be used to help facilitate social networking. We build Find and Connect, a system that integrates offline activities and interactions captured in real time with online connections in a conference environment, to provide a list of potential people one should connect to for forming an ephemeral social network. We investigate how social connections can be established and integrated with physical resources through positioning technology, and the relationship between physical proximity encounters and online social connections. Results from our two datasets of two trials, one at the UIC/ATC 2010 conference and GCJK internal marketing event, show that social connections that are reciprocal in relationship, such as friendship and exchanged contacts, have tighter, denser, and highly clustered networks compared to unidirectional relationships such as follow. We discover that there is a positive relationship between physical proximity encounters and online social connections before the social connection is made for friends, but a negative relationship for after the social connection is made. The first indicates social selection is strong, and the second indicates social influence is weak. Even though our dataset is sparse, nonetheless we believe our work is promising and novel which is worthy of future research.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 4, Issue 3
Special Sections on Paraphrasing; Intelligent Systems for Socially Aware Computing; Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction
June 2013
435 pages
ISSN:2157-6904
EISSN:2157-6912
DOI:10.1145/2483669
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 July 2013
Accepted: 01 December 2012
Revised: 01 November 2011
Received: 01 July 2011
Published in TIST Volume 4, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Ephemeral social network
  2. mobile social network
  3. physical proximity
  4. resource
  5. social networking

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