SmartCampus Applications
CampusMesh
CampusMesh is a location-aware geo-temporal social matching, reminding and coordination system. CampusMesh encourages the formation of new friendships, supports goal directed team formation, and geo-temporal personal relationship management through geo-temporal social matching, social network visualizations, and user diaries/scheduling. In other words, the aim is the design of a mobile system that helps people meet each other and co-ordinate better.
CampusMesh runs on a Smartphone. The system enables instant messaging between CampusMesh users and individuals using AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ. It also enables match and reminder alerts through sophisticated affinity matching (see description of SmartCampus SocialDesktop and Architecture below). A progressive identity revelation system allows users to share information with newly introduced individuals at their own pace to provide them with adequate privacy controls. CampusMesh also has an event and reminder information window. Not only can this be used to set reminders for oneself, but alerts can be sent out by the system or contacts. Examples of alerts can be information on an upcoming party or event, an alert that a new match is nearby, or a message that you need to meet with someone for class.
CampusWiki
CampusWiki provides context-aware editable web pages about NJIT places, people and organizations according to location and season via an analysis of wireless access point used and DNS lookup. This means that a user can log into CampusWiki in one building of NJIT, and the system will know where that user logged in. Content related to the place (information about the place and locations nearby) will appear on the Wiki home page.
Ratings systems are used on shopping websites so that people can help each other find the right products to buy. Websites such as ratemyprofessor.com allow students to rate the performance of professors, so that students have a hand in choosing which class to take. Our system allows students to rate qualities of places, professors, and each other. We allow customized rating categories, such that everyone has the ability to create their own rating categories. This creates limitless possibilities.
Link: http://wiki.njit.edu
NJIT's SmartCampus Explorer
SmartCampus Explorer enables map-based presentation of community activity at various locations including: digital graffiti, user's important places, community "hangouts", location owners/managers, and social profiles. It also enables the capture and management of user's mobility trace data.
Personalized interactive map displayed on smart phones will position the user at a social place identified by the community place or "hangouts" identification mechanism. Community place or "hangouts" identification automatically identifies a user's social place or hangouts using user's mobility trace. User can label a newly identified social place, edit already existing label or view the labels given for a particular place by different users. SmartCampus Explorer also includes features that enable users to train the wifi location system. Wifi location system estimates a user's physical location based on the visible WiFi access points. It will enable users to rectify user location displayed on the map. This will be used for identifying areas of poor wifi coverage as well as to collect Finger prints of access points seen at those areas.
SmartCampus SocialDesktop
Social Desktop is the sister application to CampusMesh. This desktop program visualizes the social network of individuals and NJIT as a whole. Users fill in a profile of their information, including interests, classes, and pastimes. Users see a moveable web of people and groups they are related to, like their friends, classmates, and others they decide to add to their network. Users can group their contacts into private groups, which also enables them to appear in the CampusMesh IM list.
The community feature of the Social Desktop allows users to create groups and communities based on interests or common information. Computer Science students are clustered; Frisbee players create a group for themselves; IS Department faculty create a private group. Each of these groups can then be given a forum and IRC chat channel which will enable a sense of community. Users have the ability to search and navigate through different public groups, which they can join. This system creates a sense of community, since people within NJIT are able to discover each other in a brand new way.
Geomemory
GeoMemory is an in situ multi-media and location aware capture tool for mobile phones. Currently, cameras on phones allow users to save the picture locally, send it to a contact, or send it to their service provider's website for download later. The GeoMemory system will allow users to send the picture to their account on the GeoMemory server. They also have the option of adding a rating and a caption to the picture.
The main application of the system will run on desktops. Once they log in, users see a map with geographic pointers of where they took pictures. The social network of contacts and friends created through CampusMesh and SmartCampus will allow users to see their friends' pictures, leaving comments and feedback. The main goal of this application is to create a community based on images and events based on location and time. The idea is to mesh together websites such as Flickr, Google Maps, and Facebook into one application.
SmartCampus Architecture
Most of the SmartCampus applications consist of two components: (1) a thin system client that can reside on any mobile or personal computing device; and (2) a system service built on top of our SmartCampus middleware. The SmartCampus middleware securely collects individual, community, place, and social event data from associated system applications, which are continually mined to produce increasingly rich social models of the campus environment. A large spectrum of services can then access the knowledge derived from these models in a simple and secure way through a Service API.
The SmartCampus middleware has the following five components:
- Data Collection - This component collects static and dynamic data from the clients, services, and physical infrastructure in the form of places, mobility traces, device tracking and social event data.
- Data Mining - This module uses the data collected to infer new community places, social patterns, and affinities among individuals or groups of users through social network profiling. This knowledge can be used to enrich user profiles and build social ties.
- Security and Privacy Manager - This module provides security primitives for authentication, authorization, auditing, and key management. It also introduces privacy-preserving techniques during data mining (e.g., anonymizing data) and real-time social matching (e.g., cloaking the identity of users during social introductions).
- Data Cache - To improve efficiency, the middleware maintains a cache of recently collected or mined data. This allows services to rapidly access data about on-campus users and provide quicker real-time answers.
- Event Dispatcher - This module is responsible for event registration, management, schedule, and delivery. When a user needs to register for implicit alerts (e.g., a new social match or a reminder), the corresponding service is informed; then, the service registers the event with the Event Dispatcher. Based on timers, co-location, or new matches identified by the Data Mining module, the Event Dispatcher informs the services so they can deliver the newly triggered events.