Socially aware, computation and communication

Although developers of communication-support tools have certainly tried to create products that support group thinking, they usually do so without adequately accounting for social context, so that all too often these systems are jarring and even downright rude. In fact, most people would agree that today´s communication technology seems to be at war with human society. Technology must account for this by recognizing that communication is always socially situated and that discussions are not just words but part of a larger social dialogue. This web of social interaction forms a sort of collective intelligence; it is the unspoken shared understanding that enforces the dominance hierarchy and passes judgment about it. We have found nonlinguistic social signals to be particularly powerful for analyzing and predicting human behavior, sometimes exceeding even expert human capabilities. Psychologists have firmly established that social signals are a powerful determinant of human behavior and speculate that they might have evolved as a way to establish hierarchy and group cohesion.