This thesis takes in to account mainly the cooperative design and human factors from ubiquitous computing design perspective. Areas such as role of cooperative design in ubiquitous computing perspective, the changing attributes of society and the associated issues, the changing shape of public service delivery and need for a change in methodology in ubiquitous computing projects have been discu...

Social experiences and interaction can be critical to the conceptualization and design of a collaborative learning environment. Social computing offers a theoretical context for investigating the ways in which the environment can create rich social experiences that serve as a foundation for building effective learning support.

Agents can be thought of as following a social behaviour, depending on the context in which they are interacting. We devise a computationally grounded mechanism to represent and reason about others in social terms, reflecting the local perspective of an agent (first-person view), to support both stereotypical and empathetic reasoning. We use a hierarchy of agent models to discriminate which beh...

The emergence of Web 2.0 triggered a general trend towards online social interactions and brought sociology in the global interactive picture. The emergence of Web 2.0 has brought about the opportunity to create new educational uses of Web 2.0 user centred software. Social software platforms, human networks, and human activities in Web 2.0 refer to a set of technologies for sharing information ...

This paper explores social computing from the perspective of sociology and its effect on social networks. We focus on traditions of symbolism, personalization, and gift culture to better understand the lived experience of participants engaging in social networking tasks. Our review reveals the importance of symbolic communication, creating strong emotional ties through personalization, and crea...

The emergence of computational social science has had a transformative influence on the geographical sciences, integrating diverse themes of scholarship and allying it with the pursuit of grand challenges in the physical, natural, and life sciences. Geography has benefitted from many of these developments and has, in turn, catalyzed significant advances and innovation in computational social sc...

Cloud computing is offering utility oriented IT services to users worldwide. It enables hosting of applications from consumer, scientific and business domains. However data centers hosting cloud computing applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. With the increasingly ubiquitous nature of Social Networks and Soc...

ion Software systems are built from abstractions. The extent to which abstraction is fundamental to software systems can be hard to explain to someone who hasn’t built them; while to someone who has, it can be so ubiquitous as to have become invisible. But the very essence of software system design is the manipulation, combination, and creation of abstractions. User interfaces offer us abstract...

Design is fundamentally a social activity; through a series of projects that examined groups of designers engaged in real design activity, a model of design communications as the mutual building a shared understanding leads us to a different approach in which computing is used not in service of the individual, but of the group and as part of a larger fabric of communications technologies. These...

The rational choice model of human behavior provides general assumptions that underlie most of the predictive behavioral modeling done in the social sciences. Surprisingly, despite its origins in the work of eminent mathematicians and computer scientists and its current prominence in the social sciences, there has been relatively little interest among hard scientists in incorporating rational c...