Extracting Social and Community Intelligence from Digital Footprints: An Emerging Research Area

摘要

As a result of the recent explosion of sensor-equipped mobile phone market, the phenomenal growth of Internet and social network users, and the large deployment of sensor network in public facilities, private buildings and outdoor environments, the "digital footprints" left by people while interacting with cyber-physical spaces are accumulating with an unprecedented breadth, depth and scale. The technology trend towards pervasive sensing and large-scale social and community computing is making "social and community intelligence (SCI)", a new research area take shape, that aims at mining the "digital footprints" to reveal the patterns of individual, group and societal behaviours. It is believed that the SCI technology has the potential to revolutionize the field of context-aware computing. The aim of this position paper is to identify this emerging research area, present the research background and some references to the relevant research fields, define the general system framework, predict some potential application areas, and propose some initial thoughts about the future research issues and challenges in social and community intelligence.