Incentives and Two-Sided Matching - Engineering Coordination Mechanisms for Social Clouds

The Social Cloud framework leverages existing relationships between members of a social network for the exchange of resources. This thesis focuses on the design of coordination mechanisms to address two challenges in this scenario. In the first part, user participation incentives are studied. In the second part, heuristics for two-sided matching-based resource allocation are designed and evaluated

A simulator for social exchanges and collaborations — Architecture and case study

Social collaboration scenarios, such as sharing resources between friends, are becoming increasingly prevalent in recent years. An example of this new paradigm is Social Cloud Computing, which aims at leveraging existing digital relationships within social networks for the exchange of resources among users and user communities. Due to their complexity, such platforms and systems have to be carefully designed and engineered to suit their purpose. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose simulation tool to help in the design and analysis of Social Collaboration Platforms, and discuss potential use cases and the architecture of the simulator. To show the usefulness of the simulator, we present a simple use case in which we study the effects of an incentive scheme on the system and its user community