Jesper Jarlskov's development blog

In my last blog post I wrote a fundamental introduction to context-awareness, and mentioned briefly how it fitted into my daily life, and my bachelor’s thesis.
This time I will explain a bit more what the thesis will be about.

For my bachelor’s thesis I will try and combine information gathered from a person’s social media accounts, with their context at any given time. Parts of this has been realized earlier, for instance in the project Dodgeball, recently closed by Google, or the similar Foursquare project. These services works (/worked) by having the user send in a text message from their cell phone, and “check-in” at specified venues, their friends in the vicinity will then be notified allowing people to hook up without ad hoc.
The vision of the bachelor’s thesis is to let people find each other in a similar way, but without the actual user interaction (of course you would still have to do the actual moving), by having your cell phone share your location with your friends through social media sites like facebook. This could make it easier to meet up with people you know when your going out, for example by checking if you actually show up at the events you RSVP’ed on facebook, and check if any of your friends are there.

Context-based event suggestions

Combining the enormous amounts of data provided by all of the social media sites wouldn’t be feasible, one reason is that the amounts of data would become to much for anyone, without proper filtering, another reason is that the size of a project like that, would be a lot larger than what’s available for a bachelor’s thesis.
To put up relevant boundaries for the project I will concentrate on suggesting music events based on the kind of music the user prefers, and the location of the user.
The project should end out with an application for a cell phone (probably for Android) that would, when activated, will inform the user of music events starting in his vicinity, based on his musical preferences.

The details

The project is still in a pretty early stage so a most details still need a lot of work. I will most likely end up with 2 programming tasks, the mobile application as described above, and a server application. This is done to keep the mobile application as simple (small) as possible, to let the server take care of most API work and filtering (to save power) and to try and separate different layers of the application, keeping a loose coupling.
Another aspect that has to be considered further is the security aspect. Where should login details and passwords for the different social media sites be stored and stuff. The information has to be at-hand for the server application to fetch the user’s data from the sites, but the info itself should only be available to the owner.

Related posts:

1. Context-awareness