SISSI 2010 - Workshop on Social Interaction in Spatially Separated Environments (SISSI)

Social relationships between co-workers, family members or friends play an important role in our everyday lives. They are responsible for our well-being, for a productive working atmosphere and for feeling part of our various communities. While working and living co-located with our peers, establishing and maintaining such relationships is a natural process. Nevertheless, our lives have changed quite drastically in the past decades.

Today, social groups are often constantly or temporarily spatially separated. Coworkers of today's corporations and research projects are often working in different physical locations. Teams are distributed over multiple branch offices, situated in different cities, countries or even on other continents. Relatives and friends are often spread all over the world. Thus, it becomes more and more important to develop methods to stay in touch with our non co-located peers.

A wide range of methods has already been developed to enable interaction and communication between separated groups and individuals, including traditional approaches, e. g. letters and phone calls, as well as modern alternatives, such as emails and videoconferences. Also, social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, experienced an enormous growth in the recent years. Nevertheless, these approaches suffer from several drawbacks.

Using these interaction methods usually implies a major effort for keeping relationships between social groups alive. Due to their planned and explicit nature, they hardly allow spontaneous and casual interactions between individuals, e. g. occasional meetings on the office floor, meetings at the coffee dispenser or at the lunchroom. Nevertheless, these social interactions are important for establishing social relationships and a feeling of togetherness between the members of social groups. It is often not the explicit, formal interaction, but the more subtle, social interaction happening during everyday occurrences that creates and stimulates a productive, creative and enjoyable atmosphere and is crucial for vivid relationships. Implicit communication, like seeing someone walking down the floor, can be as important for a feeling of togetherness as explicit interactions, e.g., chatting about news and ideas.

Despite the apparent importance of supporting such social interactions in our everyday lives and work, little effort has so far been put in the development of appropriate technical and conceptual methods to enable explicit and implicit social interactions within spatially separated teams and social groups. Appropriate methods to sense and communicate social spatial behavior of group members to remote peers are still missing. They imply manifold technological and conceptual challenges, such as:

How can social activity be recognized and represented in an appropriate way?
How can a system detect a suitable situation for communication?
How can we interpret human spatial behavior to allow reasoning for upcoming events?
What are appropriate visualizations and interaction primitives in spatially separated settings?
How can an activity of a remote group be communicated without intruding into their privacy, but allowing for the important implicit communication?
How can we teach systems to extend the spatial cognition of peers to peers at remote locations?
What are the social factors for the acceptance of such systems in distributed groups?

Goals and Research Themes of SISSI 2010
The goal of this workshop is to identify ubiquitous technologies, techniques and challenges related to the idea of bringing separated social groups closer together by facilitating social interactions between them. These social ubiquitous systems need to have a sense for social and contextual awareness and initiate communication between groups or individuals if the situation allows for it. The workshop addresses an interdisciplinary topic and thus invites contributions from the fields of pervasive and ubiquitous computing, spatial cognition, human computer interaction and communication science.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Recognition of Social Activities
Multimodal Representation of Social Activities
Impact of Spatial Separation on Social Behavior
Case Studies of Ubiquitous Systems in distributed settings
Transitions between Implicit and Explicit Interactions
Privacy Issues of Ubiquitous Systems for Social Interaction and Communication
Issues regarding User Acceptance and Obtrusiveness of Ubiquitous Systems in Spatially Separated Environments
Context-based Reasoning in Spatially Separated Environments
Spatial Cognition in Spatially Separated Environments
Designs enabling Social Interaction in Distributed Display Environments