Studies show that a person is willing to join a social group activity if the activity is interesting, and if some close friends also join the activity as companions. The literature has demonstrated that the interests of a person and the social tightness among friends can be effectively derived and mined from social networking websites. However, even with the above two kinds of information widel...

Groups – social communities are important components of entire societies, analysed by means of the social network concept. Their immanent feature is continuous evolution over time. If we know how groups in the social network has evolved we can use this information and try to predict the next step in the given group evolution. In the paper, a new aproach for group evolution prediction is present...

This paper examines the decentralized formation of groups within a multiagent normative society. In our case, a group is defined based on the set of social norms used by its members: all the agents using the same set of norms belong to the same social group. In this paper we explore different mechanisms that allow agents to recognize the others as members of a certain social group. Considering ...

The prolific use of participatory web and social networking sites is reshaping the ways in which people interact with one another. It has become a vital part of human social life in both the developed and developing world. People sharing certain similarities or affiliates tend to form communities within social media. At the same time, they participate in various online activities: content shari...

Cooperation is important but difficult to achieve in social dilemmas. It is even more challenging to promote cooperation among individuals from diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we design a lab experiment to investigate how group identity influences cooperation and peer punishment under the voluntary contribution mechanism of public goods. Artificial groups are created in the lab through rand...

Social group recommender systems aim to recommend items of interest to a social group or a community of people. The user issues in such systems cannot be addressed by examining the satisfaction of their members as individuals. Rather, group satisfaction should be studied as a result of the interaction and interface methods that support group dynamics and interaction. This report first introduce...

– Group structure is an important characteristic of social crowd. However, up to now, the effect of group structure to crowd behavior has not been widely studied. This is partially due to the fact that modeling group-related behavior is a challenging task because of the many factors that need to be considered. This paper presents a uniformed framework for modeling different group structures in ...

Social interaction is a fundamental aspect of human life and is also a key research area in psychology and cognitive science. Social psychologists have been researching the dimensions of social interaction for decades and found out that a variety of social communicative cues strongly determine social behavior and interaction outcomes. Many of these cues are consciously produced, in the form of ...

This chapter follows this direction and proposes a detailed overview of the work we are conducting to detect and characterize social interactions, with particular reference to groups. In particular, we will present three scenarios where a group of interacting people is first detected, using positional and orientation features, and then characterized by extracting voice activities from solely vi...

This paper examines the decentralized recognition of groups within a multiagent normative society. In this work we explore different mechanisms that allow agents to recognize the others as members of a certain social group. Considering as the basic mechanism the one that makes agents interact with other agents without considering the previous interactions and with no communication, three new al...