Intelligent Ubiquitous Services Based on Social Networks

A number of studies have been conducted on discovering useful information from social networks among people. Particularly, on ubiquitous environment, the social network between people, regarded as the channel for exchanging and propagating their contexts, plays a crucial role on being aware of the user contexts. To efficiently discover the contexts of a certain users, the contexts of his neighbors on the social network can be fused to provide mobile recommendation services to mobile subscribers. In this chapter, we focus on a social network-based service provision on the ubiquitous environment, and introduce two case studies. Firstly, mobile services have been provided by discovering social networks. Telecommunication data collected from mobile subscribers has been statistically analyzed. Secondly, all possible on- and off-line social networks were mobilized to build an ego-centric social network, since the social network of a user has been fragmented into more than one. We have collected the social network dataset from online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, CyWorld, and co-authoring patterns in major Korean journals) and offline (e.g., co-participation patterns in a number of Korean domestic conferences). Once the ego-centric social networks have been configured, mobile services were provided to the conference participants by sending text messages about time schedule of relevant presentations. In conclusion, the social network among mobile users can play an important role in determining whether the ubiquitous services is contextually relevant or not.