The aim of the project SOCIAL is to explore possibilities to facilitate spontaneous and informal communication in spatially distributed groups by exploiting smart environments and ambient intelligence.

Spontaneous and informal communication has a strong impact on the productivity, social identity, and wellbeing of work groups.
The spatial distance between peers plays a key role in successfully establishing and maintaining such communication.
In co-located teams, spontaneous communication occurs day-to-day:
People occasionally meet on office floors, at the coffee corner, or have lunch together.
Today, however, we often encounter distributed work settings that impede spontaneous communication between co-workers, as teams are distributed over branch offices located in different cities and countries.

We will approach this problem by exploiting the capabilities of our Spatial Interaction Lab (SIL) to:

• detect situations with the potential for spontaneous informal communication
• represent these situations appropriately to distant users
• enable users to engage in spontaneous and informal communication spanning multiple spatial locations

Collaboration Partners

The project is a collaboration between the Cognitive Systems group af the University of Bremen and the Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems group at the University of Oldenburg.

• Prof. Christian Freksa (Bremen)
• Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll (Oldenburg)
• Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou (Oldenburg)
• Dr. Frank Dylla (Bremen)
• Jasper van de Ven (Bremen)

We gratefully acknowledge funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

BA/MA Theses

There are currently two theses within the SOCIAL project:

- Kommunikation über Audiosignale zwischen räumlich entfernten Gruppen (MA Thesis) by Marina Sartison
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll and Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou

- Lenkung der Aufmerksamkeit auf eine potentielle Kommunikationssituation im Büroalltag (BA Thesis) by Bastian Ehrhard
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll and Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou

Publications

- Anastasiou, D., Wallbaum, T. (2015). SOCIAL Communication through HCI at Workplace and in Domestic Life. Tutorium at the Mensch und Computer Conference, 6-9 September, Stuttgart, Germany.

- Anastasiou, D., Heuten, W., Boll, S. (2015). Multimodal Signals for Designing an Awareness-Communication System. Presentation at the: 3rd European Symposium on Multimodal Communication, 17-18 September, Dublin, Ireland.

- Van de Ven, J., Anastasiou, D., Dylla, F., Freksa, C., Boll, S. (2015). The SOCIAL Project. Approaching Spontaneous Communication in Distributed Work Groups. In: Proceedings of Ambient Intelligence Conference, 11-13 November, Athens, Greece.