Urban Enclave Location-Aware Social Computing

Urban enclaves have richly interconnected social and physical geographies, much of which is hidden from casual observation. As a result, interpersonal collaboration, coordination, and socio-physical navigation is often suboptimal. We are exploring how ubiquitous social computing applications that seamlessly provide location-aware information about people and places could help address this situation. As part of this effort, we are turning an urban university campus into a living laboratory for systems that link people-to-people-to-place. This allows us to examine human centered computing challenges, such as effective privacy management and social recommendation system design, through use of a suite of applications glued together by a unified middleware layer that leverages an increasingly rich model of an enclave’s people and places.