Urban Radar: An Enabler for Place-aware Spontaneous Interactions

Abstract

With the advancements on mobile phones and the integration of multiple communication interfaces, interaction between users is no longer restricted to spaces with connectivity with the Internet but can happen anywhere, anytime. This has promoted the development of frameworks to enable the interaction of co-located users. One of the challenging points of this interaction is to find similar and trustable users to interact with. Existing works focus mostly on properties related to mobile users to find similar users in the surroundings. However, the features of the space in which the interaction is taking place are an important factor for recommendation since it provides hints about the most suitable type of interaction among co-located users. In this work we present a mediator application called Urban Radar, designed for supporting spontaneous interaction of co-located users taking into account the semantics of the place. Our evaluation shows that the mobile social application recommendation based on placeness either extremely or mostly satisfies 60% of users.