Towards Socially Aware Mobile Phones

Mobile phones currently represent the most pervasive technology for enabling social networking. They collect a wide range of socially meaningful data, such as address book contacts, pictures, call logs and exchanged messages. This data, however, is highly underutilized as it is managed by separate applications which are typically unaware of the user’s social setting. This “unawareness” makes the user a slave of his device instead of helping him achieve his goals or manage his everyday activities. Enhancing next generation mobile phone with socially-aware features will provide significant benefits. In this paper, we present real data collected from a user study about mobile phone usage, with the aim of providing evidence for the need of socially-aware phone applications. As a relevant example of socially-aware capability, we analyze the case of interruption management, i.e., how and why users respond to an incoming call or message by interrupting their current activity. To automate interruption management on mobile phones, we suggest the adoption of a policy-based approach to express socially-aware policies based on Semantic Web technologies.