SpinRadar: a spontaneous service provision middleware for place-aware social interactions

With the advancements of mobile phones and the integration of multiple communication interfaces, online social interaction between users is no longer restricted to a specific place with connectivity to the Internet but can happen anywhere and at any time. This has promoted the development of mobile social applications to enable opportunistic interactions with co-located users. One of the challenging problems in such interactions is to discover interaction opportunities with nearby users. Existing works focus on properties related to mobile users in order to find similar users in the surrounding area; these works depend on predefined logic such as conditional statements to recommend spontaneous social interaction opportunities. However, the social implications of the place in which the interaction is taking place are an important factor for recommendations, as those implications provide hints about the most plausible types of interactions among co-located users. In this work, we present a middleware called SpinRadar which is designed to support spontaneous interactions between co-located users by taking into account the semantics of a place, which we call ‘placeness.’ Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme satisfies users much more than existing schemes.