The Convergence of Mobile, Social and Location Based Applications

1. Wilfred Mworia

2. Where this talk fits in
 Social
 Mobile location
 Mapping/Community/Participatory
Mapping

3. Some Takes from Twitter &
Facebook
 Social data over time
 The concept of „Timeline‟
 The „Social Graph‟
 How does the „social graph‟ change over
time…? Does this change have any
significance

4. ???
Social
actions
E.g.
friend
Invites
(s)
Time (t)

6. Time
 Things happen over time
 Online Social Experience: capturing static
points on a continuum – tweets, fb updates
 These static points are relevant for various
reasons:
 Importance to self: what I value, what I find fun..
 Importance to significant others: 'friends„
 Where they happen e.g. I am having fun at
WhereCampAfrica in Nairobi, new place - new
experience
 Time, or capturing (and sharing) moments in
time
 Mobile Enhanced

7. Space
 GPS
 Lat, Lon
 Commoditization – not hard to get a
GPS enabled device
 Social commoditization – „ku-facebook’
Mobile Enhanced

8. Key Premises
 People move from place to place, period
(geo-location)
 People move for some purpose, and
have certain experiences there, and
want to share those experiences (social)

9.  What are the chances that my
'motion' influencers are similar to
some other (known or unknown)
person who could be in the same
context? e.g. tourist in the same
town? attending a conference?

10. Creating a New Social
Experience
 A framework that combines social +
location
 NOT just social…. plus geotagging; but
geo as a central component
 Three components:
 Capture: collect social + location based info
 Mine: mining that data, finding patterns,
search
 Visualize: visualizing this data in a way that
makes sense

11. Case: GeoLife
 A Microsoft Research (MSR Asia) Project
 Xing Xie, Yu Zheng
 “… GeoLife focuses on visualization,
organization, fast retrieval, and effective
understanding of GPS track logs for both
personal and public use. [A] platform for
people to effectively manage their GPS
data… understand a person‟s past
experience from GPS data.”

12. Case: GeoLife
 Sharing life experiences with GPS
trajectories
 Generic travel recommendation
 Personalized location & friend
recommendation

13. GeoLife Architecture
GeoLife: Managing and Understanding your Past Life over Maps. Yu Zheng et al.

14. GeoLife: Managing and Understanding your Past Life over Maps. Yu Zheng et al.

15. GeoLife: Managing and Understanding your Past Life over Maps. Yu Zheng et al.

16. References
 GeoLife: Building social networks using
human location history
http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/geolife
 GeoLife: Managing and Understanding
your Past Life over Maps. Yu Zheng et al.
 Longhao Wang, Yu Zheng, Xing Xie. A
Flexible Spatio- Temporal Indexing
Scheme for Large-Scale GPS Track
Retrieval. In Proc. of
MDM‟08, Beijing, China. 2008