Supporting Ubiquitous Interaction in Dynamic Shared Spaces through Automatic Group Formation Based on Social Context

This paper investigates how the management of groups that communicate electronically, such as group formation, can be simplified based on users´ context and social relations. This work builds on a framework for Aggregated Social Graphs, where each node represents the relational strength to other users. The strength of a relation is calculated by utilizing information on how we communicate using mobile phone calls, emails, and social networks in combination with additional sources of information such as from calendars. A contextual group management schema is presented where contextual parameters such as tags, locations and objects are used to prune an aggregated social graph in order to automatically form a group. The schema is implemented in a runtime environment based on the Distributed Shared Memory service available at Ericsson Labs. The feasibility of the proposed schema is then studied through a prototype implementation both in a web-browser and as a mobile app. The study shows that a group can be formed automatically and that a lightweight communication session then can be initiated for that group.