(this one's for your emily): VibeFones: Socially Aware Mobile Phones by Anmol Madan, Alex ìSandyî Pentland . A paper that is going to be presented next friday in Montreux, Switzerland for the International Seminar of Wearable Computing.
In this paper, we describe mobile social software that uses location, proximity and tone of voice to create a sophisticated understanding of people's social lives, by mining their face-to-face and phone interactions. We describe several applications of our system ñ automatic characterization of social and workplace interactions, a courtesy reminder for phone conversations, and a personal trainer for dating encounters. (...) We introduce the paradigm of mobile devices as social coaches or personal trainers, for phone conversations and dating encounters. Several related issues deserve consideration - how can we improve the accuracy of our predictions, and how appropriate and useful is this type of feedback?
Why do I blog this? what is interesting here is that the phone becomes a socially-aware arifacts by measuring non-linguistic speech (viz. tone, prosody) and interaction metadata (e.g. physical proximity). The point is hence to use the phone as "social prosthesis". However I am less interested by this idea of social coach