Social Life Networks: Next Generation of Social Networks to support livelihood activities of People especially in Developing Countries

Speaker: Athula Ginige

Affiliation: University of Western Sydney

Time: Monday 17/09/2012 from 14:00 to 15:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Parramatta (EB.1.32), accessible from Campbelltown (26.1.50) and Penrith (Y239).

Abstract:

Today there are over 5 billion people in the world having access to the internet using mobile phones. Of this 3.5 billion is living in developing countries. Closer to 1 billion people mainly in developed countries are using social networks; which is the most used online application to share social and other information. The information needs of the 3.5 billion people living in developing countries are much different to what is currently available from social networks. They need information to support their livelihood activities.

An international collaborative research project is now underway involving researchers from Australia (UWS, Macquarie, ACU), University of California, Irvine in USA, University of Salerno in Italy and Sri Lanka (University of Colombo, University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology) to develop next generation of Social Networks called Social Life Networks (SLN) to support livelihood activities of people in developing countries. SLN uses advance information aggregation and knowledge management techniques to derive aggregated information such as market prices, production level predications etc in real time from the information users provide to the system via their mobile phones. Users are provided with easy to use interferes on their mobile phones to access this aggregated information as well as other information that they need to take decisions related to their livelihood activities (farming techniques, pest control methods, livestock diseases and vaccination etc). This domain specific knowledge is extracted from published authoritative online data sources with the help of domain ontologies.

The first SLN is being developed for farmers in Sri Lanka. Over production of vegetables such as leeks, tomatoes have been a recurrent news item in Sri Lanka for the last few years. This has resulted in farmers not been able to sell their harvest leading into financial difficulties, sometimes even committing suicide due to desperation. To reduce this over production situation farmer will need to know how much of a particular crop has already been planted by others at the time the farmer is deciding what crop to grow. The challenge is to provide this information at the right time which is the initial focus of this collaborative research project.

At this seminar I will highlight the research challenges and present the solutions that have been currently developed. I will also share the approaches the research team of about 20 researchers across 4 continents are using to collaboratively work on this project.

Biography: Athula is a Professor with the School of Computing and Mathematics