ABSTRACT:

Existing social networking services recommend friends to users based on their social graphs, which may not be the most appropriate to reflect a user’s preferences on friend selection in real life. In this paper, we present Friendbook, a novel semantic-based friend recommendation system for social networks, which recommends friends to users based on their life styles instead of social graphs. By taking advantage of sensor-rich smartphones, Friendbook discovers life styles of users from user-centric sensor data, measures the similarity of life styles between users, and recommends friends to users if their life styles have high similarity. Inspired by text mining, we model a user’s daily life as life documents, from which his/her life styles are extracted by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm.

We further propose a similarity metric to measure the similarity of life styles between users, and calculate users’ impact in terms of life styles with a friend-matching graph. Upon receiving a request, Friendbook returns a list of people with highest recommendation scores to the query user. Finally, Friendbook integrates a feedback mechanism to further improve the recommendation accuracy. We have implemented Friendbook on the Android-based smartphones, and evaluated its performance on both small-scale experiments and large-scale simulations. The results show that the recommendations accurately reflect the preferences of users in choosing friends.

INTRODUCTION:

What Is A Social Network?

Wikipedia defines a social network service as a service which “focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.”

A report published by OCLC provides the following definition of social networking sites: “Web sites primarily designed to facilitate interaction between users who share interests, attitudes and activities, such as Facebook, Mixi and MySpace.”

What Can Social Networks Be Used For?

Social networks can provide a range of benefits to members of an organization:

Support for learning: Social networks can enhance informal learning and support social connections within groups of learners and with those involved in the support of learning.

Support for members of an organisation:  Social networks can potentially be used my all members of an organisation, and not just those involved in working with students. Social networks can help the development of communities of practice.

Engaging with others: Passive use of social networks can provide valuable business intelligence and feedback on institutional services (although this may give rise to ethical concerns).

Ease of access to information and applications: The ease of use of many social networking services can provide benefits to users by simplifying access to other tools and applications. The Facebook Platform provides an example of how a social networking service can be used as an environment for other tools.

Common interface: A possible benefit of social networks may be the common interface which spans work / social boundaries. Since such services are often used in a personal capacity the interface and the way the service works may be familiar, thus minimising training and support needed to exploit the services in a professional context.  This can, however, also be a barrier to those who wish to have strict boundaries between work and social activities.

Examples of popular social networking services include:

Facebook: Facebook is a social networking Web site that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information. In May 2007 Facebook launched the Facebook Platform which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features

MySpace: MySpace is a social networking Web site offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs and groups, commonly used for sharing photos, music and videos.

Ning: An online platform for creating social Web sites and social networks aimed at users who want to create networks around specific interests or have limited technical skills.

Twitter: Twitter is an example of a micro-blogging service. Twitter can be used in a variety of ways including sharing brief information with users and providing support for one’s peers.

Note that this brief list of popular social networking services omits popular social sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube.

Opportunities and Challenges

The popularity and ease of use of social networking services have excited institutions with their potential in a variety of areas. However effective use of social networking services poses a number of challenges for institutions including long-term sustainability of the services; user concerns over use of social tools in a work or study context; a variety of technical issues and legal issues such as copyright, privacy, accessibility; etc.

Institutions would be advised to consider carefully the implications before promoting significant use of such services.

Twenty years ago, people typically made friends with others who live or work close to themselves, such as neighbors or colleagues. We call friends made through this traditional fashion as G-friends, which stands for geographical location-based friends because they are influenced by the geographical distances between each other. With the rapid advances in social networks, services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have provided us revolutionary ways of making friends. According to Facebook statistics, a user has an average of 130 friends, perhaps larger than any other time in history. One challenge with existing social networking services is how to recommend a good friend to a user. Most of them rely on pre-existing user relationships to pick friend candidates.

For example, Facebook relies on a social link analysis among those who already share common friends and recommends symmetrical users as potential friends. Unfortunately, this approach may not be the most appropriate based on recent sociology findings. According to these studies, the rules to group people together include: 1) habits or life style; 2) attitudes; 3) tastes; 4) moral standards; 5) economic level; and 6) people they already know. Rather, life styles are usually closely correlated with daily routines and activities. Therefore, if we could gather information on users’ daily routines and activities, we can exploit rule #1 and recommend friends to people based on their similar life styles. This recommendation mechanism can be deployed as a standalone app on smartphones or as an add-on to existing social network frameworks. In both cases, Friendbook can help mobile phone users find friends either among strangers or within a certain group as long as they share similar life styles.

LITRATURE SURVEY:

1) “Probabilistic mining of socio geographic routines from mobile phone data”

AUTHORS:  K. Farrahi and D. Gatica-Perez

There is relatively little work on the investigation of large-scale human data in terms of multimodality for human activity discovery. In this paper, we suggest that human interaction data, or human proximity, obtained by mobile phone Bluetooth sensor data, can be integrated with human location data, obtained by mobile cell tower connections, to mine meaningful details about human activities from large and noisy datasets. We propose a model, called bag of multimodal behavior that integrates the modeling of variations of location over multiple time-scales, and the modeling of interaction types from proximity. Our representation is simple yet robust to characterize real-life human behavior sensed from mobile phones, which are devices capable of capturing large-scale data known to be noisy and incomplete. We use an unsupervised approach, based on probabilistic topic models, to discover latent human activities in terms of the joint interaction and location behaviors of 97 individuals over the course of approximately a 10-month period using data from MIT’s Reality Mining project. Some of the human activities discovered with our multimodal data representation include “going out from 7 pm-midnight alone” and “working from 11 am-5 pm with 3-5 other people,” further finding that this activity dominantly occurs on specific days of the week. Our methodology also finds dominant work patterns occurring on other days of the week. We further demonstrate the feasibility of the topic modeling framework for human routine discovery by predicting missing multimodal phone data at specific times of the day.

1. Collaborative and structural recommendation of friends using weblog-based social network analysis

AUTHORS:  W. H. Hsu, A. King, M. Paradesi, T. Pydimarri, and T. Weninger

In this paper, we address the problem of link recommendation in weblogs and similar social networks. First, we present an approach based on collaborative recommendation using the link structure of a social network and content-based recommendation using mutual declared interests. Next, we describe the application of this approach to a small representative subset of a large real-world social network: the user/community network of the blog service Live Journal. We then discuss the ground features available in Live Journal’s public user information pages and describe some graph algorithms for analysis of the social network. These are used to identify candidates, provide ground truth for recommendations, and construct features for learning the concept of a recommended link. Finally, we compare the performance of this machine learning approach to that of the rudimentary recommender system provided by Live Journal.

1. Understanding Transportation Modes Based on GPS Data for Web Applications.

AUTHORS:  Y. Zheng, Y. Chen, Q. Li, X. Xie, and W.-Y. Ma.

User mobility has given rise to a variety of Web applications, in which the global positioning system (GPS) plays many important roles in bridging between these applications and end users. As a kind of human behavior, people’s transportation modes, such as walking and driving, can provide pervasive computing systems with more contextual information and enrich a user’s mobility with informative knowledge. In this article, we report on an approach based on supervised learning to automatically infer users’ transportation modes, including driving, walking, taking a bus and riding a bike, from raw GPS logs. Our approach consists of three parts: a change point-based segmentation method, an inference model and a graph-based post-processing algorithm. First, we propose a change point-based segmentation method to partition each GPS trajectory into separate segments of different transportation modes. Second, from each segment, we identify a set of sophisticated features, which are not affected by differing traffic conditions (e.g., a person’s direction when in a car is constrained more by the road than any change in traffic conditions). Later, these features are fed to a generative inference model to classify the segments of different modes. Third, we conduct graph-based post-processing to further improve the inference performance. This post-processing algorithm considers both the commonsense constraints of the real world and typical user behaviors based on locations in a probabilistic manner. The advantages of our method over the related works include three aspects. 1) Our approach can effectively segment trajectories containing multiple transportation modes. 2) Our work mined the location constraints from user-generated GPS logs, while being independent of additional sensor data and map information like road networks and bus stops. 3) The model learned from the dataset of some users can be applied to infer GPS data from others. Using the GPS logs collected by 65 people over a period of 10 months, we evaluated our approach via a set of experiments. As a result, based on the change-point-based segmentation method and Decision Tree-based inference model, we achieved prediction accuracy greater than 71 percent. Further, using the graph-based post-processing algorithm, the performance attained a 4-percent enhancement.

1. Online friend recommendation through personality matching and collaborative filtering

AUTHORS: L. Bian and H. Holtzman

Most social network websites rely on people’s proximity on the social graph for friend recommendation. In this paper, we present Matchmaker, a collaborative filtering friend recommendation system based on personality matching. The goal of Matchmaker is to leverage the social information and mutual understanding among people in existing social network connections, and produce friend recommendations based on rich contextual data from people’s physical world interactions. Matchmaker allows users’ network to match them with similar TV characters, and uses relationships in the TV programs as parallel comparison matrix to suggest to the users friends that have been voted to suit their personality the best. The system’s ranking schema allows progressive improvement on the personality matching consensus and more diverse branching of users’ social network connections. Lastly, our user study shows that the application can also induce more TV content consumption by driving users’ curiosity in the ranking process.

SYSTEM ANALYSIS:

EXISTING SYSTEM:

Most of the friend suggestions mechanism relies on pre-existing user relationships to pick friend candidates. For example, Facebook relies on a social link analysis among those who already share common friends and recommends symmetrical users as potential friends. The rules to group people together include:

• Habits or life style
• Attitudes
• Tastes
• Moral standards
• Economic level; and
• People they already know.

Apparently, rule #3 and rule #6 are the mainstream factors considered by existing recommendation systems.

DISADVANTAGES:

• Existing social networking services recommend friends to users based on their social graphs, which may not be the most appropriate to reflect a user’s preferences on friend selection in real life

PROPOSED SYSTEM:

• A novel semantic-based friend recommendation system for social networks, which recommends friends to users based on their life styles instead of social graphs.
• By taking advantage of sensor-rich smartphones, Friendbook discovers life styles of users from user-centric sensor data, measures the similarity of life styles between users, and recommends friends to users if their life styles have high similarity.
• We model a user’s daily life as life documents, from which his/her life styles are extracted by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm.
• Similarity metric to measure the similarity of life styles between users, and calculate users’
• Impact in terms of life styles with a friend-matching graph.
• We integrate a linear feedback mechanism that exploits the user’s feedback to improve recommendation accuracy.

ADVANTAGES:

• Recommend potential friends to users if they share similar life styles.
• The feedback mechanism allows us to measure the satisfaction of users, by providing a user interface that allows the user to rate the friend list

HARDWARE & SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

HARDWARE REQUIREMENT:

v    Processor                                 –    Pentium –IV

• Speed       –    1 GHz
• RAM       –    256 MB (min)
• Hard Disk      –   20 GB
• Floppy Drive       –    44 MB
• Key Board      –    Standard Windows Keyboard
• Mouse       –    Two or Three Button Mouse
• Monitor                       –    SVGA

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

JAVA

• Operating System        :           Windows XP or Win7
• Front End       :           JAVA JDK 1.7
• Back End :           MYSQL Server
• Server :           Apache Tomact Server
• Script :           JSP Script
• Document :           MS-Office 2007