PerCol 2013 - Fourth International Workshop on Pervasive Collaboration and Social Networking (PerCol 2013)

The rapid rise of online social networks has created a new paradigm for interaction among people in the virtual world. In a logical and rapid progression many social communities are now going mobile, connecting online social networks with the physical world where the smartphone is the main interface. Considering the major players like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and the like and the millions of users worldwide, mobile social networking is already a mature mainstream technology. But there is still a vibrant research community at the intersection of pervasive computing and social computing leading to a research area called Pervasive Social Computing. Researchers broaden the view of social networks to include mobile sensor information and processing as well as new forms of interaction, e.g. with public displays or smart items. According to the five facets defined by Zhou et al., Pervasive Social Computing comprises and unifies technologies from pervasive computing, social signal processing, multimodal HCI, social networking and social media.
While not all pervasive social applications will cover all of these aspects, all of them provide means to interact and collaborate with contacts either in real-time or asynchronously while at the same time providing some link to the physical world (such as location of participants, devices or geo-tags or other relevant sensor information). Typical collaboration features include real-time chat, mutual presence information and activity streams, crowd sourcing of information, sharing sensor information, map-based interaction, proximity alerts, or even augmented reality games. Thus collaboration and social networking functionality on mobile devices is more and more tied together and creates a new social interaction experience for the participants.
The aim of the PerCol workshop is to bring together researchers from the areas of pervasive computing and social computing to explore the possibilities and challenges of future Pervasive Social Computing applications. While our focus is on pervasive technologies for human-to-human interaction, we also welcome contributions from related fields like M2M interaction, opening a perspective of new technologies and applications for Pervasive Social Computing.
Topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to):
Mobile and pervasive social networking
Activity streams in a pervasive and distributed setting
Social and pervasive context
Interaction with public displays and/or smart items
Novel types of collaboration based on online social networks
Crowdsourcing
The role of location and proximity for social applications
Using sensor information beyond location
Real-life use case experiences (e.g., pervasive health care)
Location-based and other pervasive games
Frameworks, middleware and development methods for pervasive social applications
Application and service interoperability issues
Social pervasive content sharing and media distribution
Pervasive presence and awareness
Energy efficient and mobile enabled protocols