20. Understanding and Predicting Human Behavior for Social Communities

Over the last years, with the rapid advance in technology, it is becoming increasingly feasible for people to take advantage of the devices and services in the surrounding environment to remain “connected” and continuously enjoy the activity they are engaged in, be it sports, entertainment, or work. Such a ubiquitous computing environment will allow everyone permanent access to the Internet anytime, anywhere and anyhow [1]. Nevertheless, despite the evolution of services, social aspects remain in the roots of every human behavior and activities. Great examples of such phenomena are online social networks, which engage users in a way never seen before in the online world. At the same time, being aware and communicating context is a key part of human interaction and is a particularly powerful concept when applied to a community of users where services can be made more personalized and useful. Altogether, harvesting context to reason and learn about user behavior will further enhance the future multimedia vision where services can be composed and customized according to user context. Moreover, it will help us to understand users in a better way.