UMBC iConnect
Audumbar Chormale, Dr. A. Joshi, Dr. T. Finin, Dr. Z. Segall
iConnect Overview
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Business case
Application concept and features
System architecture
Implementation details
Impact on higher education community
Demo screens
Further work
Summary
iConnect Business Case
• With thousands of colleges and universities
in the US, students are an important
market for many products
• University students are trend setters and
are establishing lifetime habits
• Most of all, they are active and social
• Make the iPhone the information portal
of choice for active, mobile students
iConnect Concept
• iConnect is a mobile 'geo-social networking'
platform allowing students and friends to share and
discover news, activities and plans
iConnect Concept
• iConnect is a mobile 'geo-social networking'
platform allowing students and friends to share and
discover news, activities and plans
• iConnect integrates information from campus
services, social networking sites like Facebook, and
Internet services
iConnect Concept
• iConnect is a mobile 'geo-social networking'
platform allowing students and friends to share and
discover news, activities and plans
• iConnect integrates information from campus
services, social networking sites like Facebook, and
Internet services
• Students manage privacy preferences with dynamic
information sharing policies based on their social
network and the semantics of their activities
iConnect Concept
iConnect Features
Personalized news and events
• Annotated with metadata
expressed in Semantic Web terms
• Relevant to user's interests,
activities and schedule
• Relevant to user's current
geolocation
iConnect Features
Context awareness
• Know where your friends are, and
what are they doing, or what are
their plans
• Share the information safely in
privacy aware system
• See your friends on a Google
map, with markers having
'FriendFeed' update details
iConnect features
Information sharing with privacy policies
• iConnect users will define dynamic policies for
privacy and information sharing using Rei
• Rei is a powerful policy system that uses
Semantic Web languages and concepts
• Examples of privacy rules a user might specify:
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share my exact location with my family
share my approximate location with my teachers and advisors
share my current activity with my close friends
don't share my sleeping activity between 9am and 9pm
my teachers are the instructors and TAs of my current
courses
iConnect features
• User Interface provides option to switch
between List View and Map view
• Update your status message
• Update your location
Feature: Map Views
Events as markers with
details at respective
locations on the map
Feature: Ambient Intimacy
See updates of friends in
list form as extracted from
social networking systems
services like FriendFeed
Feature: Status Update
• Status update UI
• Update your status
message
Feature: Location Awareness
• Our current prototype
requires manual location
updates
• Future versions will use
GPS when available and
WIFI access point data
when not
User Settings
• 'Invite friends' from Facebook profile
• Add and login into 'FB-iConnect', a Facebook
application
• Add friends that are part of the university network
• Configure privacy settings while sharing information
• Select 'who' and 'what‘ to share
• FriendFeed Nickname to retrieve FriendFeed
updates.
Facebook Interface
• The prototype gets user
data from Facebook
• Future versions will have
plugins for additional
social networking APIs
• Profile fetching application
• Gets user interests,
activities, and friends from
Facebook profile
iConnect Features
• Web application for mobile devices
• Will work with phone devices with web
browser support, such as a PDA,
SmartPhone, iPhone and Blackberry
• Zero distribution cost
iConnect Architecture
Implementation Details
Content
Source
Events and news feeds
University portal(myUMBC)
User profiles
University Directory(LDAP)
Friends list, interests and activities
Facebook
Friends’ updates
FriendFeed
Geocode information of locations
Geonames
• All events are specified with the location attribute
• Events are classified under different categories
• Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP environment
Impact on University Community
• iConnect can be readily available for all the university
members
• Effective way of recommending events
• Actuate increase in active participation of
students in the events
• Conveying safety and security alerts
• Promote social networking among students
• Increase group interaction based on common
interests
Business Model
• Content targeted advertising model
• User will see one sponsored event information
item on the ‘mapview’ UI screen or ‘listview’
UI screen of events
• Application will keep track of the user clicks
• The event advertiser will be charged per-userclick charges
Discriminators
• iConnect is a mashup integrating UMBC’s campus portal, users’ social networks and geospacial services like Google Maps and Geonames
• iConnect lets users control information sharing
by defining a privacy policy
• Users can extend and customize a standard
ontology for people, places, events, clubs,
activities, plans, etc to use in privacy policy
rules.
Prototype Preview
Home page – shows List
View of UMBC events
Prototype Preview
• Home page – shows
List View of UMBC
events
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/
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Prototype Preview
• Events as markers at
respective location on
the map
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/
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Ongoing Work
• Define proper scheme for event tags,
• Integrate client side component to access user's
location,
• Scaling the system for large number of users, by
incorporating events based service oriented approach
• Integrating with a user context server for deeper
personalization and customization of user experience.
• Using the platform in the process of learning in the class
room settings.
• Incorporating REI privacy policy mechanism
Summary
• iConnect is personalized privacy sensitive
events recommender
• Geosocial networking application for
mobile devices
• Easily accessible web application for
university community
For More Information
Contact
Audumbar Chormale
Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Baltimore MD 21250
410-xxx-xxxx
auduc1@umbc.edu