UMBC iConnect Audumbar Chormale, Dr. A. Joshi, Dr. T. Finin, Dr. Z. Segall

iConnect Overview Business case Application concept and features System architecture Implementation details Impact on higher education community Demo screens Further work Summary

iConnect Business Case With thousands of colleges and universities in the US, students are an important market for many products University students are trend setters and are establishing lifetime habits Most of all, they are active and social Make the iPhone the information portal of choice for active, mobile students

iConnect is a mobile 'geo-social networking' platform allowing students and friends to share and discover news, activities and plans iConnect Concept

iConnect is a mobile 'geo-social networking' platform allowing students and friends to share and discover news, activities and plans iConnect integrates information from campus services, social networking sites like Facebook, and Internet services iConnect Concept

iConnect is a mobile 'geo-social networking' platform allowing students and friends to share and discover news, activities and plans iConnect integrates information from campus services, social networking sites like Facebook, and Internet services Students manage privacy preferences with dynamic information sharing policies based on their social network and the semantics of their activities

iConnect Concept

iConnect Features Personalized news and events Annotated with metadata expressed in Semantic Web terms Relevant to user's interests, activities and schedule Relevant to user's current geolocation

iConnect Features Context awareness Know where your friends are, and what are they doing, or what are their plans Share the information safely in privacy aware system See your friends on a Google map, with markers having 'FriendFeed' update details

iConnect features Information sharing with privacy policies iConnect users will define dynamic policies for privacy and information sharing using Rei Rei is a powerful policy system that uses Semantic Web languages and concepts Examples of privacy rules a user might specify: share my exact location with my family share my approximate location with my teachers and advisors share my current activity with my close friends don't share my sleeping activity between 9am and 9pm my teachers are the instructors and TAs of my current courses

iConnect features User Interface provides option to switch between List View and Map view Update your status message Update your location

Feature: Map Views Events as markers with details at respective locations on the map

Feature: Ambient Intimacy See updates of friends in list form as extracted from social networking systems services like FriendFeed

Feature: Status Update Status update UI Update your status message

Feature: Location Awareness Our current prototype requires manual location updates Future versions will use GPS when available and WIFI access point data when not

User Settings 'Invite friends' from Facebook profile Add and login into 'FB-iConnect', a Facebook application Add friends that are part of the university network Configure privacy settings while sharing information Select 'who' and 'what‘ to share FriendFeed Nickname to retrieve FriendFeed updates.

Facebook Interface The prototype gets user data from Facebook Future versions will have plugins for additional social networking APIs Profile fetching application Gets user interests, activities, and friends from Facebook profile

iConnect Features Web application for mobile devices Will work with phone devices with web browser support, such as a PDA, SmartPhone, iPhone and Blackberry Zero distribution cost

iConnect Architecture

Implementation Details All events are specified with the location attribute Events are classified under different categories Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP environment ContentSource Events and news feedsUniversity portal(myUMBC) User profilesUniversity Directory(LDAP) Friends list, interests and activitiesFacebook Friends’ updatesFriendFeed Geocode information of locationsGeonames

Impact on University Community iConnect can be readily available for all the university members Effective way of recommending events Actuate increase in active participation of students in the events Conveying safety and security alerts Promote social networking among students Increase group interaction based on common interests

Business Model Content targeted advertising model User will see one sponsored event information item on the ‘mapview’ UI screen or ‘listview’ UI screen of events Application will keep track of the user clicks The event advertiser will be charged per-user- click charges

Discriminators iConnect is a mashup integrating UMBC’s cam- pus portal, users’ social networks and geo- spacial services like Google Maps and Geonames iConnect lets users control information sharing by defining a privacy policy Users can extend and customize a standard ontology for people, places, events, clubs, activities, plans, etc to use in privacy policy rules.

Prototype Preview Home page – shows List View of UMBC events

25 Home page – shows List View of UMBC events Prototype Preview

26 Events as markers at respective location on the map Prototype Preview

Ongoing Work Define proper scheme for event tags, Integrate client side component to access user's location, Scaling the system for large number of users, by incorporating events based service oriented approach Integrating with a user context server for deeper personalization and customization of user experience. Using the platform in the process of learning in the class room settings. Incorporating REI privacy policy mechanism

Summary iConnect is personalized privacy sensitive events recommender Geosocial networking application for mobile devices Easily accessible web application for university community

For More Information Contact Audumbar Chormale Computer Science & Electrical Engineering University of Maryland, Baltimore County Baltimore MD xxx-xxxx