Toward a Group-Aware Smartphone Sensing System

Today, social activities are becoming increasingly popular and important to human life. As the number of contacts increases, however, the implicit social graph becomes increasingly complex, leading to a high cost on social activity organization and activity group formation. In this article, the authors present GroupMe, a group-aware smartphone sensing system that supports group management and activity organization in real-world applications. They first present a systematic methodology that can steer the development of mobile group awareness applications, then propose a multigranular group model. Based on the methodology and the model, the authors present their approaches that support various user needs on group formation and management, including closed group suggestion, open/opportunistic grouping, and new group member suggestion. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.