Socially Aware Computing: Concepts, Technologies, and Practices

A. Chin and D. Zhang (eds.), Mobile Social Networking: An Innovative Approach, Computational Social Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8579-7_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract The advances of pervasive computing technologies signifi cantly enhance the capabilities for data capture, processing, and usage. The combination of pervasive computing and social computing leads to a new emerging research topic called ‘socially aware computing’. This new paradigm aims to leverage the large-scale diverse sensing devices that can be deployed in human daily lives to recognize individual behaviors, discover group interaction patterns, and support communication and collaboration. Smartphones, which are equipped with a variety of sensors and are popular around the world, bring new opportunities for socially aware computing. In this chapter, we introduce the defi nition of socially aware computing, discuss the main research challenges, and present our work of implementing socially aware computing by using smartphones.