Nokia Internal Use Only Connecting People at a Conference: A Study of Influence Between Offline and Online Using a Mobile Social Application Xiang Zuo, Alvin Chin 1, Xiaoguang Fan, Bin Xu, Dezhi Hong, Ying Wang, Xia Wang Nokia Xpress Internet Services China 1 Work done while at Nokia Research Center

Nokia Internal Use Only 2 Motivation Who should I meet here? Who is this person that I met? Why should I add this person to my social network? What content and groups should I join?

Nokia Internal Use Only Find the relevant people and connect with them easily in a dynamic, ephemeral environment Research problem 3

Nokia Internal Use Only Build a system using social proximity and homophily Quantify online to offline and vice versa (O2O) Contributions 4

Nokia Internal Use Only Opportunistic networking Familiar Stranger (Paulos and Goodman, 2002) Cityware (Kostakos, 2008) Proximity as a social pattern of user behavior Bluetooth to discover the relative physical closeness (Quercia and Capra, 2009), sensing and phone context (Madan et al, 2010; Aharony et al, 2011) Enhancing social interactions at conferences using RFID proximity (Atzmueller et al, 2011) Social proximity 5

Nokia Internal Use Only Prob. of being friend is inversely proportional to the distance of their self-reported addresses in Facebook and with IP and geographical address (Backstrom 2010) Physical interactions such as Bluetooth encounter can be an indicator of friendship (Eagle 2005, Quercia 2009) The more known people recommended, the more likely be accepted (Chen 2009) The more information source integrated, the richer the result and the closer the returning people to the ideal friend list (Guy 2008, 2010) 100 times powerful influence from friends than from strangers (Hui 2009) Homophily 6

Nokia Internal Use Only Online to offline and vice versa 7

Nokia Internal Use Only Ephemeral Social Network Activity ContactContextContent ESN = AC 3 8

Nokia Internal Use Only Using ESN to Bridge Online to Offline and vice versa Online social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Renren…) Activity 1 ESN 1 Activity 3 ESN 3 Activity n ESN n Offline physical activities (Conf., Meeting, Party, Shopping, Hiking…) Activity 2 ESN 2 … time 9

Nokia Internal Use Only 10 Nokia Find & Connect Your ephemeral social network conference companion

Nokia Internal Use Only 11 Nokia Find & Connect: system architecture

Nokia Internal Use Only Casually browse for a person to connect with 12

Nokia Internal Use Only 13 Find targeted person

Nokia Internal Use Only People recommended to me 14

Nokia Internal Use Only Find someone who you were together with 15

Nokia Internal Use Only Online connections: UbiComp contacts graph 16

Nokia Internal Use Only Offline connections: UbiComp encounters graph 17

Nokia Internal Use Only Online and offline from UbiComp 2011 conference 18

Nokia Internal Use Only Online to offline and vice versa from UbiComp 2011 conference 19

Nokia Internal Use Only Marginal increase in network scale for offline and online at UbiComp

Nokia Internal Use Only Accuracy of encounters Improve conversion rate from recommendation to contact More social and integration with online SNS Data too sparse, duration too short, need more users Issues 21

Nokia Internal Use Only Application useful but needs to be more sticky More than half of online interactions originate from offline interactions What triggers people to connect from offline to online? Individual user behaviour of offline and online Identify ephemeral social networks from the encounter graph and conference context Conclusions and future work 22

Nokia Internal Use Only Alvin Chin Xpress Internet Services China Nokia, Beijing Facebook: Alvin Chin LinkedIn: Twitter: gadgetman4u Sina Weibo: (gadgetman) Foursquare: Alvin Chin Google+: