PerCol 2011 - Second IEEE Workshop on Pervasive Collaboration and Social Networking (PerCol 2011)

Second IEEE Workshop on Pervasive Collaboration and Social Networking (PerCol 2011)

held in conjunction with the Ninth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2011)
Seattle, USA, March 21 - 25, 2011

Call for Paper as PDF
Workshop Scope
The rapid rise of online social communities has created a new paradigm for personal networking. Web based platforms currently attract large numbers of users. Twitter states to have more than 100 million users with a rate of 300,000 new users signing up per day. Facebook even counts more than 400 million active users these days.

In a logical and rapid progression many social communities are now going mobile, using smartphones or other wireless devices in addition to or instead of the PC. A recent comScore study revealed that in 2009 already 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via their mobile devices. Twitter mobile usage grew by 347% in this year while Facebook mobile usage was up 112% thus showing an almost exponential growth. Another trend is the rise of special mobile location-based and proximity-based social networks like Foursquare where users explore the real world connected to and aided by the social network.

As a result, online social communities become pervasively accessible providing a platform for manifold communication and interaction with network contacts both in real-time and non real-time. For instance in Facebook people interact with over 160 million objects like pages, groups and events and there are more than 25 billion pieces of content shared each month. Typical collaboration features include real-time chat, map-based interaction, notifications about friends’ activities, proximity alerts, or even augmented reality games. Thus, collaboration and social networking functionality is more and more tied together and creates a new social interaction experience for the participants. This experience becomes more and more pervasive since social networking platforms and applications are available on a large set of computing devices.

The aim of the PerCol workshop is to bring together researchers from the three areas of mobile and pervasive computing, social networking, and collaboration to explore the research challenges, potentials and business perspective of future pervasive interaction based on social networking technology. Our primary goal is to foster communication and collaboration across these disciplines to enable interdisciplinary research. Thus, contributions targeting at least two or even all of the three areas are highly encouraged. Nevertheless we also encourage authors who are specialists in one of the three areas and have a keen interest in broadening their view to present their work and to discuss how it can benefit from the related research areas.

Topics of interest
Topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to):

Novel types of collaboration in social networks
The role of location and proximity for social software
Security aspects of pervasive social networks
Real-life use case experiences (e.g., pervasive health care)
Business relevance and potentials for enterprises
Linking the physical and the virtual world
Augmented reality games
The role of sensors for pervasive collaboration/social networking
Energy efficient and mobile enabled protocols
Social pervasive content sharing and live media distribution
Pervasive presence, awareness and instant messaging
Shared viewing and shared editing on mobile devices
Software engineering challenges of pervasive social networks