Face-to-Face Contacts at a Conference: Dynamics of Communities and Roles

This paper focuses on the community analysis of conference participants using their face-to-face contacts, visited talks, and tracks in a social and ubiquitous conferencing scenario. We consider human face-to-face contacts and perform a dynamic analysis of the number of contacts and their lengths. On these dimensions, we specifically investigate user-interaction and community structure according to different special interest groups during a conference. Additionally, using the community information, we examine different roles and their characteristic elements. The analysis is grounded using real-world conference data capturing community information about participants and their face-to-face contacts. The analysis results indicate, that the face-to-face contacts show inherent community structure grounded using the special interest groups. Furthermore, we provide individual and community-level properties, traces of different behavioral patterns, and characteristic (role) profiles.