Welcome to the website of the SocioPatterns project. This projects aims to shed light on patterns in social dynamics and coordinated human activity. We do so by developing and deploying an experimental social interaction sensing platform. This platform consists of portable sensing device and software tools for aggregating, analyzing and visualizing the resulting data.

Live Social Semantics at HT09

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Following up on the success of the Live Social Semantics experiment at the European Semantic Web Conference 2009 in Greece, we will deploy a new experiment at Hypertext 2009 in Torino, from Monday 29th to July 1st. HT09 attendees will be able to experience an application that mashes up real-world social contacts and on-line friendships and interests, in real time.

This weekend: SocioPatterns workshop in Dublin

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If you already know a thing or two about Adobe Flash/Flex, Processing/Python or SuperCollider/Max/MSP, and you want to seize this unique opportunity to apply your skills in a two-day ‘Hack-a-Thon’ workshop to visualize/sonorize the SocioPatterns data stream at the Science Gallery- this is the workshop for you! This event is a hands-on exploration of possible ways of visualizing and/or sonorizing the live data-stream from the SocioPatterns deployment in the INFECTIOUS exhibition. In addition, you may be able to apply your own Arduino magic given the live data feed from the SocioPatterns deployment at the gallery by using Open Sound Control signals which Arduino can receive when connected to the network or over Wireless or Bluetooth. Arduino can, given these signals, do all kinds of stuff, like triggering blinking lights.

Basic libraries for tapping into the live data stream for each of these platforms will be provided. During the workshop, participants will be able to tap into the live data stream from the SocioPatterns deployment at the Science Gallery. Given that the participants will only have access to the live stream during the workshop, the idea is to have finished pieces by the end of the workshop. It is necessary that all participants think about what they want to do beforehand, and even pre-develop basic artwork to be used during the workshop.

This workshop is free, but you need to reserve here (hurry, because we’ve heard that there are only a few places left…)

Older Posts:

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Triple deployment
Published on June 4th, 2009

We’re proud to announce that today we had three simultaneous SocioPatterns experiments successfully up and running in three different countries. One experiment has been running for more than six weeks at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, the second has been running for the last couple of days at the European Semantic Web Conference conference [...]

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Upcoming SocioPatterns experiments
Published on May 24th, 2009

We have three new SocioPatterns experiments in the pipeline. The first will be deployed at the European Semantic Web Conference from May 31st to June 4th, in Heraklion, Greece. This deployment will focus on the integration of the real-time social interaction data with semantic data on the on-line social networks of the participants.
The second will [...]

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SocioPatterns at Infectious in the Science Gallery, Dublin
Published on April 23rd, 2009

Last week we deployed a new SocioPatterns experiment at the “Infectious” exhibition in the Science Gallery at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The following movie is a teaser for the exhibition.

Setup
All visitors of the exhibition get to wear SocioPatterns/OpenBeacon tags during their visit. For this exhibition, the firmware has been enhanced to support a “virtual [...]

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SocioPatterns at the 25C3 conference
Published on December 29th, 2008

On December 26-30th we deployed a new SocioPatterns experiment at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (25C3). This is the first large-scale deployment of our platform for sensing social interactions. We added to the visualization interface several ways of focusing on particular subsets of the real-time and cumulative contact networks. In line with the [...]

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Contact Patterns part 2
Published on December 5th, 2008

The following movie visualizes the social interactions between the participants of a recent workshop at Villa Gualino. The visualized data is obtained through a distributed sensing platform. This platform uses active RFID technology to detect “contacts” during which participants are both near each other and are facing each other. If such configuration is sustained for [...]

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Social interactions at a conference
Published on November 7th, 2008

High-resolution localization of active RFID devices by means of triangulation is a non-trivial task. However, a more coarse-grained localization, by room for example, is easily feasible.
There were three main ‘rooms’ at the “Facing the Challenge of Infectious Diseases” conference: the conference room, the bar and the cafeteria. The following figure shows how many participants were [...]

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Contact duration
Published on October 21st, 2008

We just completed a first experiment with our new contact-detection firmware for the OpenBeacon platform. The experiment was hosted at a conference on “Facing the Challenge of Infectious Diseases” and involved about 50 attendees over four days. The new firmware proved to be as much reliable in a real-world setting as it appeared to be [...]

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New firmware for contact detection
Published on September 4th, 2008

Detecting contacts between persons, in a reliable and accurate way, is a crucial requirement to achieve the scientific goals of SocioPatterns. In a variety of contexts, spatial proximity is a good proxy for social interaction. Spatial proximity of persons wearing an active RFID tag can be inferred by tracking the location of RFID tags, and [...]

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Exposing contact patterns
Published on June 13th, 2008

SocioPatterns.org aims to shed light on hidden patterns in social dynamics. A case in point is the study of contact patterns, which deals with such patterns in contacts among people. To date, little is known about these patterns. Although models can help in learning more, measuring real-world dynamics is indispensable for obtaining a complete picture. [...]

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