Exploring Social Network Indices As Cues To Augment Communication And To Improve Social Practices

PASION is an ongoing European funded project whose objective is to provide a framework capable of providing augmented communication services for several multi-user applications. The goal of our work is to give users information based on SNA indices in order to increase the awareness of their social context, their collaboration and social interaction, and to create a sense of social presence at a group level. Augmented communication is created by automatically collecting any relational event among users in a defined period of time (e.g. user x sent an email to user y at time t). Social Network Analysis is used to extract some structural information (indices) (e.g. centrality, density, reciprocity...) from the set of communication events occurred. Those indices can be coupled with information based on context (e.g. location of the user) or physiological attributes (e.g. heart rate). These indices are provided directly to users in two different modalities: visually (by using different representations according to the context) or verbally (by sending messages to the users). Because the general goal is to influence users’ behavior, these two modalities can also represent a way to implement a form of persuasive technology.