Recent News
Our FAILSAFE 2020 slides online
2020-02-22
Slides presenting our experiences from various sociometric deployments at FAILSAFE 2020 on February 17th, in Lyon, France are now available online (4.9MB).
Project officially closed
2020-01-02
We have just received information that the funding agency positively assessed the outcome of the project, and hence it is formally considered as completed.
Eighth publication
2019-12-10
We have just received a notification that our paper “Human Nature: The Subject and the Headache of Sociometric IoT-Based Studies,” has been accepted by the Program Committee of FAILSAFE 2020, a workshop colocated with EWSN 2020. See you in Lyon, France in February!
Our ICDCS 2019 slides online
2019-09-01
Slides presenting our work on monitoring analog astronauts at ICDCS 2019 on July 9th, in Dallas, TX, USA are now available online (1.6MB).
Seventh publication
2019-04-01
We have just received a notification that our paper “30 Sensors to Mars: Toward Distributed Support Systems for Astronauts in Space Habitats,” has been accepted by the Program Committee of ICDCS 2019, a top conference on distributed computing. See you in Dallas, TX, USA in July!
Research covered on national TV
2018-08-24
The experiments we conducted with the astronauts were covered on the Polish National TV Channel 1. You can watch the interview online.
Results presented at 51st ESLAB Symposium
2017-12-05
The results from our badges obtained in the lunar experiment have just been presented at the 51st ESLAB Symposium of the European Space Agency.
Badges used by astronauts again
2017-10-08
Our badges have been employed for sociometry in another mission at the Lunares habitat: ICAres-1 We are again expecting interesting data.
Badges tested by astronauts
2017-08-14
Our badges have been employed for sociometry in Lunar Expedition 1 at the Lunares habitat. We are waiting for the data.
New project member
2017-01-01
Inga Rub has just joined our team. Read more...
Another Master's thesis defended
2016-10-28
Maciej Matraszek has also defended his Master's thesis in the project. He will continue his research as PhD student.
Master's thesis defended
2016-09-27
Maciej Borsz has just defended his Master's thesis in the project. Congratulations and good luck!
Another large real-world experiment
2016-09-12
Again, we conducted a week-long real-world experiment involving approximately 45 of our badges. We are in the process of analyzing the collected gigabytes of data on social interactions.
Major real-world experiment
2016-06-13
We have just completed a week-long real-world experiment involving our badges and a number of people wearing them. We have collected lots of gigabytes of data on social interactions. Let's see what can be mined from the data.
Master's thesis defended
2016-06-07
After presenting our research at DCOSS 2016, Pawel Sienkowski has just defended his Master's thesis in the project. Congratulations!
Our DCOSS 2016 slides online
2016-05-31
Slides presenting our work on decentralized slicing algorithms at DCOSS 2016 on May 27th, in Washington, DC, USA are now available online (1MB).
Sixth publication
2016-04-03
We have just received a notification that our paper “Decentralized Slicing in Mobile Low-Power Wireless Networks,” has been accepted by the Program Committee of DCOSS 2016, a recognized conference on distributed sensing. See you in Washington, DC, USA in May!
Master's thesis defended
2015-12-18
Piotr Jaszkowski has just defended his Master's thesis in the project. Congratulations!
100 experimental badges arrived
2015-08-29
100 prototype badges for experiments with social feedback systems have arrived. We will soon start some large-scale experiments.
Our WiMAN 2015 slides online
2015-08-14
Slides presenting our hardware-software badge platform at WiMAN 2015 on August 6th, in Las Vegas, NV, USA are now available online (1.3MB).
Master's thesis defended
2015-06-30
Marcin Ziombski has just defended his Master's thesis in the project. Congratulations!
Another publication
2015-04-26
We have just received a notification that our paper “A Experimental Platform for Quantified Crowd,” has been accepted by the Program Committee of WiMAN 2015, which is co-located with IEEE ICCCN 2015. See you in Las Vegas, NV, USA in August!
Recruitment finished
2015-03-16
We have finished recruiting students for 2015. We have recruited four new students in total. The next recruitment, if at all, will take place at the beginning of 2016. Read more...
We are recruiting again
2015-01-22
We have just started recruiting new students to the project. The recruitment process will last until the end of February. Read more...
3D printer acquired
2014-12-20
We have acquired a 3D printer that will be used for building custom parts to our hardware. The printer is up and running.
Master's thesis defended
2014-09-30
Mateusz Grabowski, Michal Marschall, and Wojciech Sirko have just defended their Master's thesis in the project. Nevertheless, they plan to continue working for the project.
Our DCOSS 2014 slides online
2014-06-01
Slides presenting our aggregation algorithms at DCOSS 2014 on May 26th, in Marina Del Rey, CA, USA are now available online (890KB).
Another publication
2014-04-04
We have just received a notification that our paper “On Decentralized In-Network Aggregation in Real-World Scenarios with Crowd Mobility,” has been accepted by the Program Committee of DCOSS 2014, a recognized conference on distributed sensing. See you in Marina Del Rey, CA, USA in May!
Small paper accepted
2014-03-05
Our small paper considering the use of the mechanisms we developed for wireless sensor networks in cloud-computing environments, titled “Beyond Replicated Storage: Eventually-Consistent Distributed Data Structures,” has been accepted for presentation at PaPEC 2014: the First Workshop on the Principles and Practice of Eventual Consistency. See you at EuroSys 2014 in Amsterdam!
TOSN paper accepted
2014-03-04
We have just received a notification that our paper “Bringing Modern Unit Testing Techniques to Sensornets,” has been accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, a central, archival venue for the sensornet research community.
Our EWSN 2014 slides online
2014-02-21
Our slides presenting NarrowCast at EWSN 2014 on February 17th, in Oxford, UK are now available online (6.5MB).
Recruitment finished
2014-02-15
We have finished recruiting students for 2014. We are now fully staffed. The next recruitment will take place at the beginning of 2015. Read more...
Another real-world experiment
2014-01-17
We have conducted another major experiment with mobile sensor nodes. The results are currently being processed.
We are recruiting again
2014-01-12
We have just started recruiting new students to the project. The recruitment process will last until the end of February. Read more...
Welcome new student
2013-12-12
Our project has a new student member, Maciej Debski, who will be working on hardware-related issues. Read more...
First publication
2013-11-19
We have just received a notification that our paper “NarrowCast: A New Link-layer Primitive for Gossip-based Sensornet Protocols,” has been accepted by the Program Committee of EWSN 2014, a top conference on wireless sensor networks. See you in Oxford, UK in February!
Large real-world experiment
2013-06-06
Together with the team of the rhoRoute project, we conducted a large experiment with mobile sensor nodes. We hope to extract some socially meaningful data from the experimental logs.
Welcome new member
2013-05-08
Our project has a new member, Szymon Acedanski, who will be working on hardware-related issues. Read more...
Recruitment finished
2013-03-22
We have finished recruiting students for 2013. We now have six students in the project. The next recruitment will take place at the beginning of 2014. Read more...
We are recruiting
2013-02-20
We have just started recruiting new students to the project. The recruitment process will last until the middle of March. Read more...
Project website operational
2013-02-04
The initial version of the project website has been finished. It is now online.
Social Feedback Systems
For the past few years, we have been witnessing an explosion of services based on social ties between people, so-called social networking services. In particular, as of October 2012, Facebook, a prominent example of a social networking service, has more than one billion users. The users spend a significant fraction of their time on communicating and sharing content with their friends: other Facebook users they consider as social peers. In addition, Facebook can be used to reconnect with old friends or to organize events in the real world, to name just a few examples.
Looking at these possibilities offered by today's social networking services, we speculate that in the near future we will be using something we dubbed social feedback systems. To illustrate, let us observe that a social networking service essentially relies on maintaining and processing a digitized social network: a graph induced by the friend relation between the service users. The social network, combined with appropriate data mining algorithms, can be a foundation for a number of applications. Today, the combination is used, for instance, for recommending new friends and targeting advertisements. We envision, however, that in the future it can be employed to more directly influence the behavior of individuals and groups of people. More specifically, in our daily lives we will rely on social feedback systems: systems that combine (1) collecting social ties between people, (2) analyzing them, and (3) feeding the analytical results back to the society to activate particular individuals or groups.
Body Sensor Networks
To be effective, social feedback systems will have to meet the following two goals. First, they will have to seamlessly bridge our surrounding physical world with the digital world of the Internet. Since we operate in the physical world, lots of our social interactions are physical rather than just online. Consequently, a social feedback system, in addition to our online social interactions, will need to detect and collect interactions in the physical world. For example, the fact that we talked with a person for half an hour may be a good indication that the person should appear on our friend list. Second, any analyses and feedback such a system will provide will have to be timely. Since our interactions in the physical world are governed by time, any feedback we get is often relevant only during short time periods. For instance, information that a good friend we have not seen for a while is in the same shop as we is relevant only until we pass the counters.
For these reasons, social feedback systems will likely
leverage novel technologies:
body
sensor networks.
They are networks of tiny, wearable micro-computers that
can communicate wirelessly and can sense various aspects of
their host's environment. A well-known device of this type
is an appropriately configured smartphone.
Moreover, recently other “smart” gadgets are
being announced, such as “smart” watches or glasses.
Finally, a new class of smart devices has emerged and is gaining
industrial interest – wireless sensor nodes – which
are tinier and less obtrusive than anything before. It is
thus not hard to imagine that in the future such nodes will
be commonly embedded into apparel, everyday accessories, and
surrounding physical objects. As such, they seem ideal for
detecting real-world social interactions and providing
appropriate feedback to the people wearing them.
Research Goals
Our project concentrates around the following question: How can we build social feedback systems using body sensor networks? To answer this question, we investigate novel technologies, algorithms, and their social relevance. I want to join...