Magrathea: Building and Analyzing Ubiquitous and Social Systems

Ubiquitous systems are rapidly becoming a more and more commonplace part of our everyday life. These systems may contain different classes of very heterogeneous components that have to function seamlessly together. A prime example of a class of ubiquitous components is given by the personal mobile devices. They are all pervasive and emerge in many forms: mobile handsets, PDAs, etc. Their features and computational powers make them a very capable platform. We present a pervasive agent- and sensing platform Magrathea that can be run on different kinds of computational devices. Magrathea can be used to build complex pervasive systems. As a practical example of the usage of this platform, we use it on top of personal mobile devices to investigate the structure of social networks of different individuals and to simulate viral behavior of agents. We also discuss analytical tools to further investigate, model and simulate the data obtained through our platform.