Software Engineering for Development: A Position Statement

There is little work on targeted methodologies to develop IT applications and content in a developing world environment. This paper argues for a methodology called Socially Aware Software Engineering that we are busy formulating based on firsthand experience building Information and Communication Technology solutions. Our method is based on a classical user-centred approach from Human Computer Interaction combined with aspects of Participatory Design and cyclical software engineering practises. These approaches are wrapped into an iterative Action Research paradigm in order to directly include the community-based users of our systems. I conclude with suggestions on changing the nature of tertiary curricula in developing countries in a way that integrates this socially aware software engineering methodology

Socially Aware Software Engineering for the Developing World

While the social effects of Information Technology (IT) have received much attention there is very little work on targeted methodologies to develop IT applications and content in a developing world environment. This paper describes a methodology called Socially Aware Software Engineering we are busy formulating based on firsthand experience building Information and Communication Technology solutions. Our method is based on a classical user-centred approach from Human Computer Interaction combined with aspects of Participatory Design and cyclical software engineering practises. These approaches are wrapped into an iterative Action Research paradigm in order to directly include the community-based users of our systems. We outline three cases studies based on our evolving method. The paper concludes with suggestions on changing the nature of tertiary curricula in developing countries in a way that integrates this socially aware software engineering methodology

Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management

An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks, further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time, low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog

Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field

Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Weaving a fabric of socially aware agents

The expansion of web-enabled social interaction has shed light on social aspects of intelligence that have not been typically studied within the AI paradigm so far. In this context, our aim is to understand what constitutes intelligent social behaviour and to build computational systems that support it. We argue that social intelligence involves socially aware, autonomous individuals that agree on how to accomplish a common endeavour, and then enact such agreements. In particular, we provide a framework with the essential elements for such agreements to be achieved and executed by individuals that meet in an open environment. Such framework sets the foundations to build a computational infrastructure that enables socially aware autonomy.This work has been supported by the projects EVE(TIN2009-14702-C02-01) and AT (CSD2007-0022)Peer Reviewe