Personalizing system behaviour in a pervasive social networking system

The aim of pervasive system technology is to support the user in managing and interacting with devices in the environment around him/her. By contrast social networking systems are aimed at supporting communication and interactions between people. The major objective of the SOCIETIES project is to unite these two technologies in a seamless manner to create a platform that enables the user to interact with both devices and people in an integrated way. Such a platform, referred to as a Pervasive Social Networking System, needs to integrate the pervasive computing technologies from the user's physical spaces with social computing technologies in the user's digital spaces. An important aspect of the SOCIETIES platform is its ability to adapt its behaviour to meet the individual needs and preferences of the user. This paper focuses on some key aspects of the design of the personalization subsystem of the platform: the extraction of personalization information from digital and physical spaces, the use of this to adapt these spaces autonomously and the extension to include community information to provide additional benefit to the user. Development of the basic platform together with a set of third party services running on it is complete and the system is currently being evaluated in a real user trial by a group of University students.