Combining pervasive computing with social networking for a student environment

Whereas social networking has become an essential part of computing today, pervasive computing is seen as a key component for future systems. However, these two paradigms are complementary in many respects -- the former responsible for communication and interaction between people, the latter focused on interaction with devices and services in the environment surrounding the user. By combining these two different paradigms in an integrated and seamless fashion one may provide users with the advantages of each plus the power obtained from using them together. Thus one might combine personalization, context awareness, learning, access to a wide range of devices and services, etc., with the management and operation of communities of users. This is the goal of the SOCIETIES project. By building on recent developments in pervasive systems and mobile computing, a new type of system that combines pervasive with social networking functionality -- Pervasive Social Networking (PSN) -- has been developed based on cloud and mobile technologies. Implementation of the basic system is complete and as part of the evaluation of the system it is currently being used by a group of students in a real user trial. This paper focuses on the student aspect and describes the requirements gathering exercises conducted with students. It then describes the architecture of the final system developed to meet the requirements. It ends with a brief outline of the final trial.