Social events such as networking parties are excellent opportunities to expand one's social network and make new social ties, as well as simply have fun and enjoy oneself. With the emergence of pervasive technology, we now have the opportunity to discover face-to-face socializing behaviors of individual guests and support them in their socializing goals. Quantitative measures of socializing behaviors will be useful in diverse applications from social therapy to social event management. We propose a system that detects and analyzes group-level socializing behaviors to support real-time and ex post facto social applications deployed in real social event situations. In our approach, we exploit attendees' characteristics of socializing such as proximity and body orientation to determine social proximity among guests and subsequently detect socializing groups. We performed preliminary studies and multiple deployments of our system and example applications in real social networking parties. Evaluation shows the system can detect socializing groups accurately and support applications that satisfy the interests of guests and party hosts.

This paper discusses an approach for transforming solitary exercises into social exergames. We frame our discussion by highlighting the relation between the original exercises and game interactions, and by analyzing an example exergame which is successfully transformed from its original solitary exercise. We present a user study of the exergame that evaluates the need for holistic transformation strategies from solitary exercises into social exergames.

On school field trips, chaperoning teachers' foremost concern is the safety of the children, particularly ensuring that none of them go missing. However, they have limited attention resources and face many challenges in keeping track of their charges. We present RubberBand, an assistive application that helps alleviate the teacher's burden. Our approach adapts to diverse field trip environmental and child behavioral dynamicity, utilizing observations of the relative dispersion of children and their tendency to form sub-groups.

We envision that diverse social exercising games, or exergames, will emerge, featuring much richer interactivity with immersive game play experiences. Further, the recent advances of mobile devices and wireless networking will make such social engagement more pervasive - people carry portable exergame devices (e.g., jump ropes) and interact with remote users anytime, anywhere. Towards this goal, we explore the potential of using heterogeneous exercise devices as game controllers for a multi-player social exergame; e.g., playing a boat paddling game with two remote exercisers (one with a jump rope, and the other with a treadmill). In this paper, we propose a novel platform called ExerLink that converts exercise intensity to game inputs and intelligently balances intensity/delay variations for fair game play experiences. We report the design considerations and guidelines obtained from the design and development processes of game controllers. We validate the efficacy of game controllers and demonstrate the feasibility of social exergames with heterogeneous exercise devices via extensive human subject studies.

We demonstrate a pervasive social exergame platform called ExerLink that converts exercise intensity to game inputs and intelligently balances intensity/delay variations for fair game play experiences. Also, we show the potential of using multiple exercise devices as game controllers and incorporating multiple heterogeneous controllers into a game. Specifically, we consider a class of exercise equipment used for repetitive, individual, and aerobic (RIA) exercises such as treadmill running, stationary cycling, hula hooping, and jump roping.

In this article, we present a serendipitous social network that makes use of individuals' contextual information to connect people in shared immediate situations. We build a prototype microblogging service that uses a serendipitous social network as a substrate. We performed an initial user study and found that users engaged in shared immediate situations are likely to exchange posts relevant to their situation that provide useful information or reflect emotional understanding.

Social Web Application (SWA) design and development is a complex process that requires the understanding and coordination of several domains of knowledge. Yet there remain few if any holistic frameworks to manage this process. In this paper we present such a framework, R4. It coordinates and relates

We designed and implemented a pervasive game called Swan Boat that targets the bland and tedious nature of running on a treadmill, making it fun through social interaction and immersive game play. We developed Swan Boat on top of PSD, a platform for pervasive games, and using the Interactive Treadmill hardware. We conducted a user study to evaluate our game.