Conferator: Smart Ubiquitous and Social Interactions

Conferator: Smart Ubiquitous and Social Interactions

Conferator - A Platform for Enhancing Smart Ubiquitous and Social Interactions

Software Releases/Code: code.ubicon.eu (License: GNU AGPL, partially LGPL)

Conferator is built using the Ubicon Platform for Ubiquitous and Social Networking

When referring to the system, please cite the following publication:
Atzmueller et al. (2011) Enhancing Social Interactions at Conferences.
it - Information Technology, (53)3:101--107 URL

About Conferator

With Conferator, our intention is to support your social life at conferences. Conferator gives you the opportunity to personalize the conference schedule, and further social linking options. It also shows you a history of your social contacts at the conference and provides additional information about participants, such as their homepage, Facebook and Twitter accounts, contact details (Skype, ISQ, etc.). After the conference, Conferator will thus enable you to recall your social contacts you had during the conference.

The goal of the application is to integrate data from the social media including sensor networks for managing social interactions and behavioral patterns of the user. Then, context-dependent actions can be applied for a user, i.e., providing helpful information about currently present other users, recommendations for actions, and additional information.

Conferator is being developed by the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University and the Chair of Knowledge and Data Engineering (KDE) at the University of Kassel. Conferator has initially been developed within the context of the VENUS project at the Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG), University of Kassel, which emphasizes also legal requirements, trust, and ergonomics, in addition to the technical implementation. Therefore, we tried to design the system such that you can choose your own balance of making things public and keeping them private. You can achieve this by announcing just those of your social network accounts that you want to make public, and by using Conferator's trust function. In Conferator, unlike in many social network platforms, you can declare that you trust other people without requiring their confirmation. The more people you trust, the livelier will be your digital social life.

Acknowledgements: Conferator utilizes active RFID technology which was developed within the SocioPatterns project, whose generous support we kindly acknowledge.

If you have a question concerning Conferator please let us know and send us an e-mail: info@conferator.org
We will then get back to you shortly.


Code/Downloads

The source code of Conferator is available on bitbucket, see code.ubicon.eu.

License: The main module of Conferator/Ubicon is licensed under the AGPL, while several modules are also licensed under LGPL (see the URL above for details). For further information we also refer to the homepage of the Free Software Foundation.


Publications

Selected publications about Conferator: