Beyond the user: A review of socially aware computing

Social cognition is the main channel through which human beings access the social world, very much like vision and hearing are channels through which people access the physical world. For a long time, researchers have addressed the computational implementation of vision and hearing in domains like computer vision and speech recognition, but only early attempts have been made to do the same with social cognition. In other words: machines are beginning to be effective in handling perceptual aspects of the physical world, but up to now are devoid of social context.