Using Proximity and Homophily to Connect Conference Attendees in a Mobile Social Network

In an academic conference, it is difficult to find people that share similar research interests with you, and it is also a chore to add them into your personal online social network for later communication. Aiming at helping the conference attendees better organize their schedule and expand their social network, we designed and developed Find & Connect where we used location and encounters, together with the conference basic services, all through a web user interface, in order to get the homophily and physical interactions between users, and then to base these information for recommending new contacts to users. To demonstrate the usefulness of Find & Connect, we conducted a field trial at the UbiComp 2011 conference. Results show that users tended to consider historical physical encounter information to be the most important when they wanted to know someone or add other users as contacts, and that homophily works as a factor in users´ decision to add contacts.