User:Nliampotis/Societies (project)

SOCIETIES (Self Orchestrating CommunIty ambiEnT IntelligEnce Spaces) is a European research project funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Overview
Pervasive systems aim to seamlessly and unobtrusively enable individual users to interact with devices, networks and services in their vicinity. Until now their focus has been on the individual rather than on communities of users. This neglects an important part of human behaviour; socialising, and might partly explain the slow take-up of pervasiveness in commercial products. Social computing, on the other hand, has enjoyed meteoric success in bringing people together online. Products in this area, however, do not integrate well with any but a few of the many devices and services to which their users have access. The time is ripe for these two paradigms to converge.

The vision of SOCIETIES is to develop a complete integrated solution via a Community Smart Space (CSS) which extends pervasive systems beyond the individual to dynamic communities of users. CSSs will embrace online community services, such as Social Networking, and thus offer new and powerful ways of working, communicating and socialising.

Objectives
The goal of SOCIETIES is to radically improve the utility of future Internet services by merging social computing and pervasive computing through the design, implementation and evaluation of an open, scalable service architecture and platform for self-orchestrating Community Smart Spaces. This will be achieved through four key objectives:
 * 1) To facilitate the creation, organisation, management and communication of communities via Community Smart Spaces, where pervasive computing is integrated with social computing communities
 * 2) To provide an enhanced user experience - both for individuals and entire user communities - based on proactive smart space behaviour and dynamic sharing of community resources across geographic boundaries
 * 3) To design and prototype a robust open and scalable system for self-orchestrating Community Smart Spaces
 * 4) To evaluate, through strong involvement of end-users, the usefulness and acceptance of the developed CSS software via three user trials