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Cyber-Physical Social Networks

Published: 24 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In the offline world, getting to know new people is heavily influenced by people’s physical context, that is, their current geolocation. People meet in classes, bars, clubs, public transport, and so on. In contrast, first-generation online social networks such as Facebook or Google+ do not consider users’ context and thus mainly reflect real-world relationships (e.g., family, friends, colleagues). Location-based social networks, or second-generation social networks, such as Foursquare or Facebook Places, take the physical location of users into account to find new friends. However, with the increasing number and wide range of popular platforms and services on the Web, people spend a considerable time moving through the online worlds. In this article, we introduce cyber-physical social networks (CPSN) as the third generation of online social networks. Beside their physical locations, CPSN consider also users’ virtual locations for connecting to new friends. In a nutshell, we regard a web page as a place where people can meet and interact. The intuition is that a web page is a good indicator for a user’s current interest, likings, or information needs. Moreover, we link virtual and physical locations, allowing for users to socialize across the online and offline world. Our main contributions focus on the two fundamental tasks of creating meaningful virtual locations as well as creating meaningful links between virtual and physical locations, where “meaningful” depends on the application scenario. To this end, we present OneSpace, our prototypical implementation of a cyber-physical social network. OneSpace provides a live and social recommendation service for touristic venues (e.g., hotels, restaurants, attractions). It allows mobile users close to a venue and web users browsing online content about the venue to connect and interact in an ad hoc manner. Connecting users based on their shared virtual and physical locations gives way to a plethora of novel use cases for social computing, as we will illustrate. We evaluate our proposed methods for constructing and linking locations and present the results of a first user study investigating the potential impact of cyber-physical social networks.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 17, Issue 2
Special Issue on Advances in Social Computing and Regular Papers
May 2017
249 pages
ISSN:1533-5399
EISSN:1557-6051
DOI:10.1145/3068849
  • Editor:
  • Munindar P. Singh
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 March 2017
Accepted: 01 September 2016
Revised: 01 July 2016
Received: 01 February 2016
Published in TOIT Volume 17, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Cyber-physical social networks
  2. ad-hoc socializing
  3. data linking
  4. location-based services
  5. network creation
  6. social computing

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  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • IRC@SG Funding Initiative
  • National Research Foundation
  • Prime Minister's Office, Singapore
  • Interactive and Digital Media Programme Office (IDMPO)

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Information-driven cooperation on adaptive cyber-physical systemsApplied Mathematics and Computation10.1016/j.amc.2023.128486466(128486)Online publication date: Apr-2024
  • (2024)Link prediction for multi-layer and heterogeneous cyber-physical networksInternational Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics10.1007/s13042-024-02412-zOnline publication date: 14-Oct-2024
  • (2022)A relationship matrix resolving model for identifying vital nodes based on community in opportunistic social networksTransactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies10.1002/ett.438933:1Online publication date: 9-Jan-2022
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  • (2018)Context-Aware Social Task Resolution Using Feedback Control in Cyber Physical Systems2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops)10.1109/ICCW.2018.8403551(1-6)Online publication date: May-2018

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