• Canoe 2011 Applications

Applications - what's the next big thing in online social networks?

Participants:

• Narasimha
• Mingwen
• Dimitra
• Young
• Ye

Guiding Questions

• What are novel, innovative applications?
• What are the challenges for realizing them?
• What middleware abstractions would be required to realize these apps?
• What kind of social networking services would be useful within an enterprise.

Summary of breakout session discussion

• What are novel, innovative applications?
  1. Student behavior analysis
  2. Online rehearsal site
  3. Interest-based search tool across multiple OSNs
  4. Collaborative recommendation system
• What are the challenges for realizing them?
  • Analytic applications
    1. Evaluation metrics for the interactions
    2. Management of large volume of complex data
  • Multimedia sharing applications
    1. Low latency continuous transmission of fat streams.
    2. How is it different from the classical multimedia streaming problem? Harder constraint, because of the nature of the application
    3. Scalability w.r.t the number of the participants, number of locations, number of streams, types of streams.
    4. Synchronization: Complex interactions are there
  • Collaboration
    1. Synchronization
    2. User interface
    3. Consistency
    4. How to define semantics of the interactions
  • Recommendation (computing trust based values):
    1. How do we trust and compute the recommendations?
    2. Scalability with respect to number of users
    3. Data management
  • Search
    1. Quality of the search result
    2. May have to search huge amount of data
• What middleware abstractions would be required to realize these apps?
  • Mainly messaging middlewares
    1. End-to-end group-level communication (e.g., JGroup) for collaborative system multimedia sharing among friends.
    2. Publish/Subscribe (e.g., PADRES, SIENA, Redis) for interest-based notification of contents and interest-based search.
• What kind of social networking services would be useful within an enterprise.
  1. Analysis of the behavior of the employees through internal OSNs.
  2. Open knowledge consortium across the different enterprises to get expert recommendations on issues. For example, recommendation on possible partnership and collaboration. (Tentative, suggested by Nara and Dimitra)
  3. Federation of enterprises can collaborate in a virtual space (Tentative, by Mingwen and Nara)
  4. Search based on similar experience and expertise levels.